The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “If you’re sure you would,” returned Miss Jellyby, “I’ll get my things on.”

  Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir. I made a proposal to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that he should let me wash him, and afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible; staring at me during the whole operation, as if he never had been, and never could again be, so astonished in his life—looking very miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice it.

  What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy, and the bustle of getting myself ready, and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We found Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing-room, which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour candlestick—throwing the candle in to make it burn better. Everything was just as we had left it last night, and was evidently intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see what o’clock it was.

  But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to see us stirring so soon, and said he would gladly share our walk. So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner, and that I really should not have thought she liked me much, unless she had told me so.

  “Where would you wish to go?” she asked.

  “Anywhere, my dear,” I replied.

  “Anywhere’s nowhere,” said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

  “Let us go somewhere at any rate,” said I.

  She then walked me on very fast.

  “I don’t care!” she said. “Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don’t care—but if he was to come to our house, with his great shining lumpy forehead night after night, till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him. Such asses as he and Ma make of themselves!”

  “My dear!” I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet, and the vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. “Your duty as a child—”

  “O don’t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where’s Ma’s duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it’s much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there’s an end of it!”

  She walked me on faster yet.

  “But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come, and I won’t have anything to say to him. I can’t bear him. If there’s any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it’s the stuff he and Ma talk. I wonder the very pavingstones opposite our house can have the patience to stay there, and be a witness to such inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, and Ma’s management!”

  I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject, by Richard and Ada coming up at a round pace, laughing, and asking us if we meant to run a race? Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent, and walked moodily on at my side; while I admired the long succession and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse.

  “So, cousin,” said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada, behind me. “We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way to our place of meeting yesterday, and—by the Great Seal, here’s the old lady again!”

  Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and smiling, and saying, with her yesterday’s air of patronage:

  “The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!”

  “You are out early, ma’am,” said I, as she curtsied to me.

  “Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It’s retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day,” said the old lady, mincingly. “The business of the day requires a great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to follow.”

  “Who’s this, Miss Summerson?” whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my arm tighter through her own.

  The little old lady’s hearing was remarkably quick. She answered for herself directly.

  “A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?” said the old lady, recovering herself with her head on one side, and from a very low curtsy.

  Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday, good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with the suit.

  “Ha!” said the old lady. “She does not expect a judgment? She will still grow old. But not so old. O dear, no! This is the garden of Lincoln’s Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower in the summertime. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater part of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long vacation exceedingly long, don’t you?”

  We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.

  “When the leaves are falling from the trees, and there are no more flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor’s court,” said the old lady, “the vacation is fulfilled; and the sixth seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and see my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope, and beauty, are very seldom there. It is a long long time since I had a visit from either.”

  She had taken my hand, and, leading me and Miss Jellyby away, beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse myself, and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and half curious, and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada continued to follow; our strange conductress informing us all the time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.

  It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by, that we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments, before she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the Inn, and said, “This is my lodging. Pray walk up!”

  She had stopped at a shop, over which was written, KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window, were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles: I am reminded by mentioning the latter, that the shop had, in several particulars, the air of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled “Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office, and the letters I had so long received fro
m the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door, lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls, and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

  As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upward, like some old root in a fall of snow.

  “Hi hi!” said the old man, coming to the door. “Have you anything to sell?”

  We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her pocket, and to whom Richard now said, that, as we had had the pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up, and see her apartment for an instant; and was so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired; that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious—at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers, and said, “Aye, aye! Please her! It won’t take a minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the shop, if t’other door’s out of order!” we all went in, stimulated by Richard’s laughing encouragement, and relying on his protection.

  “My landlord, Krook,” said the little old lady, condescending to him from her lofty station as she presented him to us. “He is called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!”

  She shook her head a great many times, and tapped her forehead with her finger, to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse him, “For he is a little—you know!—M—!” said the old lady, with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.

  “It’s true enough,” he said, going before us with the lantern, “that they call me the Lord Chancellor, and call my shop Chancery. And why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor, and my shop Chancery?”

  “I don’t know, I am sure!” said Richard, rather carelessly.

  “You see,” said the old man, stopping and turning round, “they—Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!”

  “That’ll do, my good friend!” said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. “You can admire as the rest of us do, without taking that liberty.”

  The old man darted at him a sudden look, which even called my attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady herself. But as Ada interposed, and laughingly said she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.

  “You see I have so many things here,” he resumed, holding up the lantern, “of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but they know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that’s why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. And all’s fish that comes to my net. And I can’t bear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do they know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That’s the way I’ve got the ill name of Chancery. I don’t mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don’t notice me, but I notice him. There’s no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane!”

  A large grey cat leapt from some neighbouring shelf on his shoulder, and startled us all.

  “Hi! show ’em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my Lady!” said her master.

  The cat leaped down, and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.

  “She’d do as much for any one I was to set her on,” said the old man. “I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was offered to me. It’s a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn’t have it stripped off! That warn’t like Chancery practice though, says you!”

  He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his hands upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him before passing out:

  “That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in Jarndyce.”

  “Jarndyce!” said the old man with a start.

  “Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook,” returned his lodger.

  “Hi!” exclaimed the old man in a tone of thoughtful amazement, and with a wider stare than before. “Think of it!”

  He seemed so rapt all in a moment, and looked so curiously at us, that Richard said:

  “Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other Chancellor!”

  “Yes,” said the old man abstractedly. “Sure! Your name now will be—”

  “Richard Carstone.”

  “Carstone,” he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention, upon a separate finger. “Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think.”

  “He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!” said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.

  “Ay!” said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. “Yes! Tom Jarndyce—you’ll excuse me, being related; but he was never known about court by any other name, and was as well known there, as—she is now,” nodding slightly at his lodger; “Tom Jarndyce was often in here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers, and telling ’em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. ‘For,’ says he, ‘it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.’ He was as near making away with himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could be.”

  We listened with horror.

  “He come in at the door,” said the old man, slowly pointing an imaginary track along the shop, “on the day he did it—the whole neighbourhood had said for months before, that he would do it, of a certainty sooner or later—he come in at the door that day, and walked along there, and sat himself on
a bench that stood there, and asked me (you’ll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to fetch him a pint of wine. ‘For,’ says he, ‘Krook, I am much depressed; my cause is on again, and I think I’m nearer judgment than I ever was.’ I hadn’t a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to the tavern over the way there, t’other side my lane (I mean Chancery Lane); and I followed and looked in at the window, and saw him, comfortable as I thought in the arm-chair by the fire, and company with him. I hadn’t hardly got back here, when I heard a shot go echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran out—neighbours ran out—twenty of us cried at once, ‘Tom Jarndyce!’ ”

  The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the lantern, blew the light out, and shut the lantern up.

  “We were right, I needn’t tell the present hearers. Hi! To be sure, how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while the cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of ’em, grubbed and muddled away as usual, and tried to look as if they hadn’t heard a word of the last fact in the case; or as if they had—O dear me!—nothing at all to do with it, if they had heard of it by any chance!”

  Ada’s colour had entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less pale. Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was no party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh, it was a shock to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended in the minds of many people with such dreadful recollections. I had another uneasiness, in the application of the painful story to the poor half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my surprise, she seemed perfectly unconscious of that, and only led the way upstairs again; informing us, with the toleration of a superior creature for the infirmities of a common mortal, that her landlord was “a little—M—, you know!”

  She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from which she had a glimpse of Lincoln’s Inn Hall. This seemed to have been her principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there. She could look at it, she said, in the night: especially in the moonshine. Her room was clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; a few old prints from books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered against the wall; and some half-dozen reticules and work-bags, “containing documents,” as she informed us. There were neither coals nor ashes in the grate, and I saw no article of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon a shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so forth; but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in her pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood before.