Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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wasn’t handsome in you to keep my man so close, do I? Be equally
good-tempered to me, old boy! Old William Tell, Old Shaw, the Life
Guardsman! Why, he’s a model of the whole British army in himself,
ladies and gentlemen. I’d give a fifty-pun’ note to be such a
figure of a man!”
The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little
consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called
him), taking Miss Flite with him. Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went
away to the further end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and
standing by a table covered with guns. Mr. Bucket took this
opportunity of entering into a little light conversation, asking me
if I were afraid of fire-arms, as most young ladies were; asking
Richard if he were a good shot; asking Phil Squod which he
considered the best of those rifles and what it might be worth
first-hand, telling him in return that it was a pity he ever gave
way to his temper, for he was naturally so amiable that he might
have been a young woman, and making himself generally agreeable.
After a time he followed us to the further end of the gallery, and
Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came after
us. He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he
would take a visit from us very kindly. The words had hardly
passed his lips when the bell was rung and my guardian appeared,
“on the chance,” he slightly observed, “of being able to do any
little thing for a poor fellow involved in the same misfortune as
himself.” We all four went back together and went into the place
where Gridley was.
It was a bare room, partitioned off from the gallery with unpainted
wood. As the screening was not more than eight or ten feet high
and only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high
gallery roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr.
Bucket had looked down. The sun was low—near setting—and its
light came redly in above, without descending to the ground. Upon
a plain canvas-covered sofa lay the man from Shropshire, dressed
much as we had seen him last, but so changed that at first I
recognized no likeness in his colourless face to what I
recollected.
He had been still writing in his hiding-place, and still dwelling
on his grievances, hour after hour. A table and some shelves were
covered with manuscript papers and with worn pens and a medley of
such tokens. Touchingly and awfully drawn together, he and the
little mad woman were side by side and, as it were, alone. She sat
on a chair holding his hand, and none of us went close to them.
His voice had faded, with the old expression of his face, with his
strength, with his anger, with his resistance to the wrongs that
had at last subdued him. The faintest shadow of an object full of
form and colour is such a picture of it as he was of the man from
Shropshire whom we had spoken with before.
He inclined his head to Richard and me and spoke to my guardian.
“Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not
long to be seen, I think. I am very glad to take your hand, sir.
You are a good man, superior to injustice, and God knows I honour
you.”
They shook hands earnestly, and my guardian said some words of
comfort to him.
“It may seem strange to you, sir,” returned Gridley; “I should not
have liked to see you if this had been the first time of our
meeting. But you know I made a fight for it, you know I stood up
with my single hand against them all, you know I told them the
truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had
done to me; so I don’t mind your seeing me, this wreck.”
“You have been courageous with them many and many a time,” returned
my guardian.
“Sir, I have been,” with a faint smile. “I told you what would
come of it when I ceased to be so, and see here! Look at us—look
at us!” He drew the hand Miss Flite held through her arm and
brought her something nearer to him.
“This ends it. Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits
and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul
alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of
many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever
had on earth that Chancery has not broken.”
“Accept my blessing, Gridley,” said Miss Flite in tears. “Accept
my blessing!”
“I thought, boastfully, that they never could break my heart, Mr.
Jarndyce. I was resolved that they should not. I did believe that
I could, and would, charge them with being the mockery they were
until I died of some bodily disorder. But I am worn out. How long
I have been wearing out, I don’t know; I seemed to break down in an
hour. I hope they may never come to hear of it. I hope everybody
here will lead them to believe that I died defying them,
consistently and perseveringly, as I did through so many years.”
Here Mr. Bucket, who was sitting in a corner by the door, good-naturedly offered such consolation as he could administer.
“Come, come!” he said from his corner. “Don’t go on in that way,
Mr. Gridley. You are only a little low. We are all of us a little
low sometimes. I am. Hold up, hold up! You’ll lose your temper
with the whole round of ‘em, again and again; and I shall take you
on a score of warrants yet, if I have luck.”
He only shook his head.
“Don’t shake your head,” said Mr. Bucket. “Nod it; that’s what I
want to see you do. Why, Lord bless your soul, what times we have
had together! Haven’t I seen you in the Fleet over and over again
for contempt? Haven’t I come into court, twenty afternoons for no
other purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bull-dog?
Don’t you remember when you first began to threaten the lawyers,
and the peace was sworn against you two or three times a week? Ask
the little old lady there; she has been always present. Hold up,
Mr. Gridley, hold up, sir!”
“What are you going to do about him?” asked George in a low voice.
“I don’t know yet,” said Bucket in the same tone. Then resuming
his encouragement, he pursued aloud: “Worn out, Mr. Gridley? After
dodging me for all these weeks and forcing me to climb the roof
here like a tom cat and to come to see you as a doctor? That ain’t
like being worn out. I should think not! Now I tell you what you
want. You want excitement, you know, to keep YOU up; that’s what
YOU want. You’re used to it, and you can’t do without it. I
couldn’t myself. Very well, then; here’s this warrant got by Mr.
Tulkinghorn of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and backed into half-a-dozen
counties since. What do you say to coming along with me, upon this
warrant, and having a good angry argument before the magistrates?
It’ll do you good; it’ll freshen you up and get you into training
for another turn at the Chancellor. Give in? Why, I am surprised
to hear a man of your energy talk of giving in. You mustn’t do
that. You’re half the fun of the fair in the Court of Chancery.
George, you lend Mr. Gridley a hand, and let’s see now whether he
won’t be better up than down.”
“He is very weak,” said the trooper in a low voice.
“Is he?” returned Bucket anxiously. “I only want to rouse him. I
don’t like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this. It
would cheer him up more than anything if I could make him a little
waxy with me. He’s welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he
likes. I shall never take advantage of it.”
The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still rings in
my ears.
“Oh, no, Gridley!” she cried as he fell heavily and calmly back
from before her. “Not without my blessing. After so many years!”
The sun was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof, and
the shadow had crept upward. But to me the shadow of that pair,
one living and one dead, fell heavier on Richard’s departure than
the darkness of the darkest night. And through Richard’s farewell
words I heard it echoed: “Of all my old associations, of all my old
pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one
poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a
tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie
I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken!”
Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All
There is disquietude in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street. Black
suspicion hides in that peaceful region. The mass of Cook’s
Courtiers are in their usual state of mind, no better and no worse;
but Mr. Snagsby is changed, and his little woman knows it.
For Tom-all-Alone’s and Lincoln’s Inn Fields persist in harnessing
themselves, a pair of ungovernable coursers, to the chariot of Mr.
Snagsby’s imagination; and Mr. Bucket drives; and the passengers
are Jo and Mr. Tulkinghorn; and the complete equipage whirls though
the law-stationery business at wild speed all round the clock.
Even in the little front kitchen where the family meals are taken,
it rattles away at a smoking pace from the dinner-table, when Mr.
Snagsby pauses in carving the first slice of the leg of mutton
baked with potatoes and stares at the kitchen wall.
Mr. Snagsby cannot make out what it is that he has had to do with.
Something is wrong somewhere, but what something, what may come of
it, to whom, when, and from which unthought of and unheard of
quarter is the puzzle of his life. His remote impressions of the
robes and coronets, the stars and garters, that sparkle through the
surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s chambers; his veneration for the
mysteries presided over by that best and closest of his customers,
whom all the Inns of Court, all Chancery Lane, and all the legal
neighbourhood agree to hold in awe; his remembrance of Detective
Mr. Bucket with his forefinger and his confidential manner,
impossible to be evaded or declined, persuade him that he is a
party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is. And it
is the fearful peculiarity of this condition that, at any hour of
his daily life, at any opening of the shop-door, at any pull of the
bell, at any entrance of a messenger, or any delivery of a letter,
the secret may take air and fire, explode, and blow up—Mr. Bucket
only knows whom.
For which reason, whenever a man unknown comes into the shop (as
many men unknown do) and says, “Is Mr. Snagsby in?” or words to
that innocent effect, Mr. Snagsby’s heart knocks hard at his guilty
breast. He undergoes so much from such inquiries that when they
are made by boys he revenges himself by flipping at their ears over
the counter and asking the young dogs
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