Bleak House, Charles Dickens [early reader books TXT] 📗

suitor in court. He begins quite to amuse our little party. Ve-ry friendly little party, are we not?”

It was miserable to hear this from her poor mad lips, though it was no surprise.

“In short, my valued friend,” pursued Miss Flite, advancing her lips to my ear with an air of equal patronage and mystery, “I must tell you a secret. I have made him my executor. Nominated, constituted, and appointed him. In my will. Ye-es.”

“Indeed?” said I.

“Ye-es,” repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, “my executor, administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases, my love.) I have reflected that if I should wear out, he will be able to watch that judgment. Being so very regular in his attendance.”

It made me sigh to think of him.

“I did at one time mean,” said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, “to nominate, constitute, and appoint poor Gridley. Also very regular, my charming girl. I assure you, most exemplary! But he wore out, poor man, so I have appointed his successor. Don’t mention it. This is in confidence.”

She carefully opened her reticule a little way and showed me a folded piece of paper inside as the appointment of which she spoke.

“Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of birds.”

“Really, Miss Flite?” said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her confidence received with an appearance of interest.

She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy. “Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!”

The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever seen in her and went her way. Her manner of running over the names of her birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own lips, quite chilled me.

This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have dispensed with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who arrived within a minute or two after me) brought him to share our dinner. Although it was a very plain one, Ada and Richard were for some minutes both out of the room together helping to get ready what we were to eat and drink. Mr. Vholes took that opportunity of holding a little conversation in a low voice with me. He came to the window where I was sitting and began upon Symond’s Inn.

“A dull place, Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official one,” said Mr. Vholes, smearing the glass with his black glove to make it clearer for me.

“There is not much to see here,” said I.

“Nor to hear, miss,” returned Mr. Vholes. “A little music does occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and soon eject it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish him?”

I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well.

“I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his friends myself,” said Mr. Vholes, “and I am aware that the gentlemen of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters with an unfavourable eye. Our plain course, however, under good report and evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of prejudice), is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find Mr. C. looking, Miss Summerson?”

“He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.

He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly to the ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as if they were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though there were not a human passion or emotion in his nature.

“Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C., I believe?” he resumed.

“Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend,” I answered.

“But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance.”

“That can do little for an unhappy mind,” said I.

“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.

So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were something of the vampire in him.

“Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same in black kid or out of it, “this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr. C.’s.”

I begged he would excuse me from discussing it. They had been engaged when they were both very young, I told him (a little indignantly) and when the prospect before them was much fairer and brighter. When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy influence which now darkened his life.

“Just so,” assented Mr. Vholes again. “Still, with a view to everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission, Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-advised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.’s connections, against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself, but also to my own reputation⁠—dear to myself as a professional man aiming to keep respectable; dear to my three girls at home, for whom I am striving to realize some little independence; dear, I will even say, to my aged father, whom it is my privilege to support.”

“It would become a very different marriage, a much happier and better marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes,” said I, “if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which you are engaged with him.”

Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough⁠—or rather gasp⁠—into one of his black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute even that.

“Miss Summerson,” he said, “it may be so; and I freely admit that the young lady who has taken Mr. C.’s name upon herself in so ill-advised a manner⁠—you will I am sure not quarrel with me for throwing out that remark again, as a duty I owe to Mr. C.’s connections⁠—is a highly genteel young lady. Business has prevented