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

with a “mission” for

holding horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with

anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it

over-handed, and retires.

 

“My dear Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “would you be so

kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire,

and I am an old man, and I soon chill. Oh, dear me!”

 

His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by

the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up,

chair and all, and deposits him on the hearthstone.

 

“O Lord!” says Mr. Smallweed, panting. “Oh, dear me! Oh, my

stars! My dear friend, your workman is very strong—and very

prompt. O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little.

I’m being scorched in the legs,” which indeed is testified to the

noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings.

 

The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from

the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released

his overshadowed eye from its black-velvet extinguisher, Mr.

Smallweed again says, “Oh, dear me! O Lord!” and looking about and

meeting Mr. George’s glance, again stretches out both hands.

 

“My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your

establishment? It’s a delightful place. It’s a picture! You

never find that anything goes off here accidentally, do you, my

dear friend?” adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.

 

“No, no. No fear of that.”

 

“And your workman. He—Oh, dear me!—he never lets anything off

without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?”

 

“He has never hurt anybody but himself,” says Mr. George, smiling.

 

“But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good

deal, and he might hurt somebody else,” the old gentleman returns.

“He mightn’t mean it—or he even might. Mr. George, will you order

him to leave his infernal fire-arms alone and go away?”

 

Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to

the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to

rubbing his legs.

 

“And you’re doing well, Mr. George?” he says to the trooper,

squarely standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in

his hand. “You are prospering, please the Powers?”

 

Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, “Go on. You have not

come to say that, I know.”

 

“You are so sprightly, Mr. George,” returns the venerable

grandfather. “You are such good company.”

 

“Ha ha! Go on!” says Mr. George.

 

“My dear friend! But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp.

It might cut somebody, by accident. It makes me shiver, Mr.

George. Curse him!” says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy

as the trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside. “He owes

me money, and might think of paying off old scores in this

murdering place. I wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and

he’d shave her head off.”

 

Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the old

man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says

quietly, “Now for it!”

 

“Ho!” cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful

chuckle. “Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my dear friend?”

 

“For a pipe,” says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his

chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills

it and lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully.

 

This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so

difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes

exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent

vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the

visage of Mr. George. As the excellent old gentleman’s nails are

long and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green

and watery; and, over and above this, as he continues, while he

claws, to slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless

bundle, he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed

eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something

more than the ardour of affection and so shakes him up and pats and

pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that

part which the science of self-defence would call his wind, that in

his grievous distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour’s

rammer.

 

When Judy has by these means set him up again in his chair, with a

white face and a frosty nose (but still clawing), she stretches out

her weazen forefinger and gives Mr. George one poke in the back.

The trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her

esteemed grandfather, and having thus brought them together, stares

rigidly at the fire.

 

“Aye, aye! Ho, ho! U—u—u—ugh!” chatters Grandfather Smallweed,

swallowing his rage. “My dear friend!” (still clawing).

 

“I tell you what,” says Mr. George. “If you want to converse with

me, you must speak out. I am one of the roughs, and I can’t go

about and about. I haven’t the art to do it. I am not clever

enough. It don’t suit me. When you go winding round and round

me,” says the trooper, putting his pipe between his lips again,

“damme, if I don’t feel as if I was being smothered!”

 

And he inflates his broad chest to its utmost extent as if to

assure himself that he is not smothered yet.

 

“If you have come to give me a friendly call,” continues Mr.

George, “I am obliged to you; how are you? If you have come to see

whether there’s any property on the premises, look about you; you

are welcome. If you want to out with something, out with it!”

 

The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the fire, gives

her grandfather one ghostly poke.

 

“You see! It’s her opinion too. And why the devil that young

woman won’t sit down like a Christian,” says Mr. George with his

eyes musingly fixed on Judy, “I can’t comprehend.”

 

“She keeps at my side to attend to me, sir,” says Grandfather

Smallweed. “I am an old man, my dear Mr. George, and I need some

attention. I can carry my years; I am not a brimstone poll-parrot”

(snarling and looking unconsciously for the cushion), “but I need

attention, my dear friend.”

 

“Well!” returns the trooper, wheeling his chair to face the old

man. “Now then?”

 

“My friend in the city, Mr. George, has done a little business with

a pupil of yours.”

 

“Has he?” says Mr. George. “I am sorry to hear it.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Grandfather Smallweed rubs his legs. “He is a fine

young soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of Carstone. Friends

came forward and paid it all up, honourable.”

 

“Did they?” returns Mr. George. “Do you think your friend in the

city would like a piece of advice?”

 

“I think he would, my dear friend. From you.”

 

“I advise him, then, to do no more business in that quarter.

There’s no more to be got by it. The young gentleman, to my

knowledge, is brought to a dead halt.”

 

“No, no, my dear friend. No, no, Mr. George. No, no, no, sir,”

remonstrates Grandfather Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare

legs. “Not quite a dead halt, I think. He has good friends, and

he is good for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his

commission, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is

good for his chance in a wife, and—oh, do you know, Mr. George, I

think my friend would consider the young gentleman good for

something yet?” says Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet

cap and scratching his ear like a monkey.

 

Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on his

chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if

he were not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has

taken.

 

“But to pass from one subject to another,” resumes Mr. Smallweed.

“‘To promote the conversation,’ as a joker might say. To pass, Mr.

George, from the ensign to the captain.”

 

“What are you up to, now?” asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown in

stroking the recollection of his moustache. “What captain?”

 

“Our captain. The captain we know of. Captain Hawdon.”

 

“Oh! That’s it, is it?” says Mr. George with a low whistle as he

sees both grandfather and granddaughter looking hard at him. “You

are there! Well? What about it? Come, I won’t be smothered any

more. Speak!”

 

“My dear friend,” returns the old man, “I was applied—Judy, shake

me up a little!—I was applied to yesterday about the captain, and

my opinion still is that the captain is not dead.”

 

“Bosh!” observes Mr. George.

 

“What was your remark, my dear friend?” inquires the old man with

his hand to his ear.

 

“Bosh!”

 

“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Mr. George, of my opinion you

can judge for yourself according to the questions asked of me and

the reasons given for asking ‘em. Now, what do you think the

lawyer making the inquiries wants?”

 

“A job,” says Mr. George.

 

“Nothing of the kind!”

 

“Can’t be a lawyer, then,” says Mr. George, folding his arms with

an air of confirmed resolution.

 

“My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous one. He wants to see

some fragment in Captain Hawdon’s writing. He don’t want to keep

it. He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his

possession.”

 

“Well?”

 

“Well, Mr. George. Happening to remember the advertisement

concerning Captain Hawdon and any information that could be given

respecting him, he looked it up and came to me—just as you did, my

dear friend. WILL you shake hands? So glad you came that day! I

should have missed forming such a friendship if you hadn’t come!”

 

“Well, Mr. Smallweed?” says Mr. George again after going through

the ceremony with some stiffness.

 

“I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague

pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him,”

says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances

of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry

hands, “I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But

you,” breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy readjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head, “you, my dear Mr.

George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the

purpose. Anything would suit the purpose, written in the hand.”

 

“Some writing in that hand,” says the trooper, pondering; “may be,

I have.”

 

“My dearest friend!”

 

“May be, I have not.”

 

“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen.

 

“But if I had bushels of it, I would not show as much as would make

a cartridge without knowing why.”

 

“Sir, I have told you why. My dear Mr. George, I have told you

why.”

 

“Not enough,” says the trooper, shaking his head. “I must know

more, and approve it.”

 

“Then, will you come to the lawyer? My dear friend, will you come

and see the gentleman?” urges Grandfather Smallweed, pulling out a

lean old silver watch with hands like the leg of a skeleton. “I

told him it was probable I might call upon him between ten and

eleven this forenoon, and it’s now half after ten. Will you come

and see the gentleman, Mr. George?”

 

“Hum!” says he gravely. “I don’t mind that. Though why