Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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“any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead
to a result so much to his advantage. That’s reason number one.”
“I hope number two’s as good?” snarls the old man.
“Why, no. It’s more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I
must have gone to the other world to look. He was there.”
“How do you know he was there?”
“He wasn’t here.”
“How do you know he wasn’t here?”
“Don’t lose your temper as well as your money,” says Mr. George,
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “He was drowned long
before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship’s side.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don’t know. Perhaps your
friend in the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr.
Smallweed?” he adds after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied
on the table with the empty pipe.
“Tune!” replied the old man. “No. We never have tunes here.”
“That’s the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it’s
the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter
—excuse me, miss—will condescend to take care of this pipe for two
months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr.
Smallweed!”
“My dear friend!” the old man gives him both his hands.
“So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I
fall in a payment?” says the trooper, looking down upon him like a
giant.
“My dear friend, I am afraid he will,” returns the old man, looking
up at him like a pygmy.
Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting
salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour,
clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he
goes.
“You’re a damned rogue,” says the old gentleman, making a hideous
grimace at the door as he shuts it. “But I’ll lime you, you dog,
I’ll lime you!”
After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened
to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours,
two unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black
Serjeant.
While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough face. It is eight o’clock now, and the day is fast drawing
in. He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides
to go to Astley’s Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the
horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a
critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of
unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In
the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and
condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with
the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.
The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and
Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent
foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions,
and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.
Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court and
a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of
which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE’S
SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.
Into George’s Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are
gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for
rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances,
and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these
sports or exercises being pursued in George’s Shooting Gallery to-night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man
with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the
floor.
The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with
gunpowder and begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the
light before a glaring white target, the black upon him shines
again. Not far off is the strong, rough, primitive table with a
vice upon it at which he has been working. He is a little man with
a face all crushed together, who appears, from a certain blue and
speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents, to have been
blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times.
“Phil!” says the trooper in a quiet voice.
“All right!” cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.
“Anything been doing?”
“Flat as ever so much swipes,” says Phil. “Five dozen rifle and a
dozen pistol. As to aim!” Phil gives a howl at the recollection.
“Shut up shop, Phil!”
As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is
lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of
his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy
black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and
rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to
his hands that could possibly take place consistently with the
retention of all the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and
crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy
benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a
curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against
the wall and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead
of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the
four walls, conventionally called “Phil’s mark.”
This custodian of George’s Gallery in George’s absence concludes
his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out
all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out
from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These
being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his
own bed and Phil makes his.
“Phil!” says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces.
“You were found in a doorway, weren’t you?”
“Gutter,” says Phil. “Watchman tumbled over me.”
“Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning.”
“As nat’ral as possible,” says Phil.
“Good night!”
“Good night, guv’ner.”
Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to
shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his
mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes
to bed too.
Mr. Bucket
Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, though the
evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn’s windows are wide open,
and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be
desirable characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or
January with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry
long vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks
like peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy
swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look
tolerably cool to-night.
Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn’s windows, and plenty
more has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick
everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way
takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings
as much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law—or Mr. Tulkinghorn,
one of its trustiest representatives—may scatter, on occasion, in
the eyes of the laity.
In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which
his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of
earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits
at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a
hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine
with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful
cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he
dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of
fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he
descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted
mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering
doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and
carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score
and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so
famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern
grapes.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys
his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence
and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than
ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy,
pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows,
associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank
shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for
himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will—all a
mystery to every one—and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of
the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life
until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving
(as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave
his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked
leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.
But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual
length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly
and uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild,
shining man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer
bids him fill his glass.
“Now, Snagsby,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, “to go over this odd story
again.”
“If you please, sir.”
“You told me when you were so good as to step round here last
night—”
“For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir;
but I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that
person, and I thought it possible that you might—just—wish—to—”
Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to
admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr.
Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, “I must ask
you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure.”
“Not at all,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “You told me, Snagsby, that
you put on your hat and came round without mentioning your
intention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it’s not
a matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned.”
“Well, sir,” returns Mr. Snagsby, “you see, my little woman is—not
to put too fine a point upon it—inquisitive. She’s inquisitive.
Poor little thing, she’s liable to spasms, and it’s good for her to
have her mind employed. In consequence of
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