“This is strong language, William Guppy,” returns Mr. Weevle.
“Sir, it may be,” retorts Mr. William Guppy, “but I feel strongly when I use it.”
Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong, and begs Mr. William Guppy to think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however, having got the advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more injured remonstrance.
“No! Dash it, Tony,” says the gentleman, “you really ought to be careful how you wound the feelings of a man, who has an unrequited image imprinted on his art, and who is not altogether happy in those chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions. You, Tony, possess in yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye, and allure the taste. It is not—happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish that I could say the same—it is not your character to hover around one flower. The ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry you through it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to sound even your feelings without a cause!”
Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, saying emphatically, “William Guppy, drop it!” Mr. Guppy acquiesces, with the reply, “I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord.”
“And now,” says Tony, stirring the fire, “touching this same bundle of letters. Isn’t it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed twelve o’clock tonight to hand ’em over to me?”
“Very. What did he do it for?”
“What does he do anything for? He don’t know. Said, today was his birthday, and he’d hand ’em over tonight at twelve o’clock. He’ll have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day.”
“He hasn’t forgotten the appointment, I hope?”
“Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him tonight, about eight—helped him to shut up his shop—and he had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off, and showed ’em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his cap on the chair back, and stood turning them over before the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards through the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he knows—about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or other. He has been as quiet, since, as an old rat asleep in his hole.”
“And you are to go down at twelve?”
“At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a hundred.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, after considering a little with his legs crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”
“Read! He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can’t put them together. He’s too old to acquire the knack of it now—and too drunk.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs; “how do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”
“He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he has, and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye alone. He imitated it—evidently from the direction of a letter; and asked me what it meant.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again; “should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a woman’s?”
“A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s—slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”
Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.
“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house tonight? Is there a chimney on fire?”
“Chimney on fire!”
“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here, on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off—smears, like black fat!”
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back, and says it’s all right, and all quiet; and quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby, about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.
“And it was then,” resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, “that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s portmanteau?”
“That was the time, sir,” answers Tony, faintly adjusting his whiskers. “Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for tonight, and advising him not to call before: Boguey being a Slyboots.”
The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle, sits so ill upon him tonight, that he abandons that and his whiskers together; and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up, a prey to the horrors again.
“You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That’s the arrangement, isn’t it, Tony?” asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting his thumb-nail.
“You can’t speak too low. Yes. That’s what he and I agreed.”
“I tell you what, Tony—”
“You can’t speak too low,” says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.
“I tell you what. The first thing to be done is, to make another packet, like the real one; so that, if he should ask to see the real one while it’s in my possession, you can show him the dummy.”
“And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it—which with his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely than not,” suggests Tony.
“Then we’ll face it out. They don’t belong to him, and they never did. You found that; and you placed them in my hands—a legal friend of yours—for security. If he forces us to it, they’ll be producible, won’t they?”
“Ye-es,” is Mr. Weevle’s reluctant admission.
“Why, Tony,” remonstrates his friend, “how you look! You don’t doubt William Guppy? You don’t suspect any harm?”
“I don’t suspect anything more than I know, William,” returns the other, gravely.
“And what do you know?” urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a little; but on his friend’s once more warning him, “I tell you, you can’t speak too low,” he repeats his question without any sound at all; forming with his lips only the words, “What do you know?”
“I know three things. First, I know that here we are whispering in secrecy; a pair of conspirators.”
“Well!” says Mr. Guppy, “and we had better be that, than a pair of noodles, which we should be, if we were doing anything else; for it’s the only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?”
“Secondly, it’s not made out to me how it’s likely to be profitable, after all.”
Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf, and replies, “Tony, you are asked to leave that to the honour of your friend. Besides it’s been calculated to serve that friend, in those chords of the human mind which—which need not be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion—your friend is no fool. What’s that?”
“It’s eleven o’clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul’s. Listen, and you’ll hear all the bells in the city jangling.”
Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is, that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet, that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive t
he two friends happen to be, that the air is full of these phantoms; and the two look over their shoulders by one consent, to see that the door is shut.
“Yes, Tony?” says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire, and biting his unsteady thumb-nail. “You were going to say, thirdly?”
“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.”
“But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony.”
“Maybe not, still I don’t like it. Live here by yourself, and see how you like it.”
“As to dead men, Tony,” proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, “there have been dead men in most rooms.”
“I know there have; but in most rooms you let them alone, and—and they let you alone,” Tony answers.
The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service; that he hopes so. There is an oppressive blank, until Mr. Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been stirred instead.
“Fah! Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,” says he. “Let us open the window a bit, and get a mouthful of air. It’s too close.”
He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in and half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near, to admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking up; but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy tone.
“By the by, Tony, don’t forget old Smallweed”; meaning the Younger of that name, “I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather of his is too keen by half. It runs in the family.”
“I remember,” says Tony. “I am up to all that.”
“And as to Krook,” resumes Mr. Guppy. “Now, do you suppose he really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to you, since you have been such allies?”
Tony shakes his head. “I don’t know. Can’t imagine. If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better informed no doubt. How can I know without seeing them, when he don’t know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is, and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end, may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It’s a monomania with him, to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me.”
“How did he first come by that idea, though? that’s the question,” Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation. “He may have found papers in something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be; and may have got it into his shrewd head, from the manner and place of their concealment, that they are worth something.”
“Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he may have been muddled altogether, by long staring at whatever he has got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor’s Court and hearing of documents for ever,” returns Mr. Weevle.
Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.
“What in the Devil’s name,” he says, “is this! Look at my fingers!”
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
“What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of window?”
“I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been here!” cries the lodger.
And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips, and creeps away down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool.
“This is a horrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. “Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off.”
He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy, and stood silently before the fire, when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says:
“It’s the appointed time at last. Shall I go?”
Mr. Guppy nods, and gives him a “lucky touch” on the back; but not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.
He goes downstairs; and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself, before the fire, for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the stairs creak, and Tony comes swiftly back.
“Have you got them?”
“Got them! No. The old man’s not there.”
He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval, that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him, and asks loudly, “What’s the matter?”
“I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!”—Tony ends this with a groan.
Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it, and stands snarling—not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair back, hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat.
“Look!” whispers the lodger, pointing his friend’s attention to these objects with a trembling finger. “I told you so. When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair—his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off, before he went to put the shutters up—and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor.”
Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No.
“See!” whispers Tony. “At the foot of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it fall.”
“What’s the matter with the cat?” says Mr. Guppy. “Look at her!”
“Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place.”
They advanced slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.
Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.
Help, help, help! come into this house for Heaven’s sake!
Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, en
gendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.
*
CHAPTER 33
INTERLOPERS
Now do those two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons who attended the last Coroner’s Inquest at the Sol’s Arms, reappear in the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in fact, breathlessly fetched by the active and intelligent beadle), and institute perquisitions through the court, and dive into the Sol’s parlour, and write with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper. Now do they note down, in the watches of the night, how the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, thrown into a state of the most intense agitation and excitement by the following alarming and horrible discovery. Now do they set forth how it will doubtless be remembered, that some time back a painful sensation was created in the public mind, by a case of mysterious death from opium occurring in the first floor of the house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general marine store shop, by an eccentric individual of intemperate habits, far advanced in life, named Krook; and how, by a remarkable coincidence, Krook was examined at the Inquest, which it may be recalled was held on that occasion at the Sol’s Arms, a well-conducted tavern, immediately adjoining the premises in question on the west side, and licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. James George Bogsby. Now do they show (in as many words as possible), how during some hours of yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was observed by the inhabitants of the court, in which the tragical occurrence which forms the subject of that present account transpired; and which odour was at one time so powerful, that Mr. Swills, a comic vocalist, professionally engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby, has himself stated to our reporter that he mentioned to Miss M. Melvilleson, a lady of some pretensions to musical ability, likewise engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby to sing a series of concerts called Harmonic Assemblies or Meetings, which it would appear are held at the Sol’s Arms, under Mr. Bogsby’s direction, pursuant to the Act of George the Second, that he (Mr. Swills) found his voice seriously affected by the impure state of the atmosphere; his jocose expression, at the time, being, “that he was like an empty post-office, for he hadn’t a single note in him.” How this account of Mr. Swills is entirely corroborated by two intelligent married females residing in the same court, and known respectively by the names of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins; both of whom observed the foetid effluvia, and regarded them as being emitted from the premises in the occupation of Krook, the unfortunate deceased. All this and a great deal more, the two gentlemen, who have formed an amicable partnership in the melancholy catastrophe, write down on the spot; and the boy population of the court (out of bed in a moment) swarm up the shutters of the Sol’s Arms parlour, to behold the tops of their heads while they are about it.
The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White) Page 88