The client is a handsome old lady; no other than Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold. She comes out of the sanctuary with a fair old-fashioned curtsy, and softly shuts the door. She is treated with some distinction there; for the clerk steps out of his pew to show her through the outer office, and to let her out. The old lady is thanking him for his attention, when she observes the comrades in waiting.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?”
The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr. George not turning round from the almanac over the fireplace, Mr. Bagnet takes upon himself to reply, “Yes, ma’am. Formerly.”
“I thought so. I was sure of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the sight of you. It always does at the sight of such. God bless you, gentlemen! You’ll excuse an old woman; but I had a son once who went for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in his bold way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother. I ask your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!”
“Same to you, ma’am!” returns Mr. Bagnet, with right good will.
There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old lady’s voice, and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old figure. But Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the fireplace (calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he does not look round until she has gone away, and the door is closed upon her.
“George,” Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers, when he does turn from the almanac at last. “Don’t be cast down! ‘Why, soldiers, why—should we be melancholy, boys?’ Cheer up, my hearty!”
The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there, and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility, “Let ’em come in then!” they pass into the great room with the painted ceiling, and find him standing before the fire.
“Now, you men, what do you want? Sergeant, I told you the last time I saw you that I don’t desire your company here.”
Sergeant replies—dashed within the last few minutes as to his usual manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage—that he has received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has been referred there.
“I have nothing to say to you,” rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. “If you get into debt, you must pay your debts, or take the consequences. You have no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?”
Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money.
“Very well! Then the other man—this man, if this is he—must pay it for you.”
Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with the money either.
“Very well! Then you must pay it between you, or you must both be sued for it, and both suffer. You have had the money and must refund it. You are not to pocket other people’s pounds, shillings, and pence, and escape scot free.”
The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George hopes he will have the goodness to—
“I tell you, Sergeant, I have nothing to say to you. I don’t like your associates, and don’t want you here. This matter is not at all in my course of practice, and is not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good enough to offer these affairs to me, but they are not in my way. You must go to Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn.”
“I must make an apology to you, sir,” says Mr. George, “for pressing myself upon you with so little encouragement—which is almost as unpleasant to me as it can be to you; but would you let me say a private word to you?”
Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets, and walks into one of the window recesses. “Now! I have no time to waste.” In the midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp look at the trooper; taking care to stand with his own back to the light, and to have the other with his face towards it.
“Well, sir,” says Mr. George, “this man with me is the other party implicated in this unfortunate affair—nominally, only nominally—and my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my account. He is a most respectable man with a wife and family; formerly in the Royal Artillery—”
“My friend, I don’t care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal Artillery establishment—officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses, guns, and ammunition.”
“ ’Tis likely, sir. But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife and family being injured on my account. And if I could bring them through this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any other consideration, what you wanted of me the other day.”
“Have you got it here?”
“I have got it here, sir.”
“Sergeant,” the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless manner, far more hopeless in the dealing with, than any amount of vehemence, “make up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final. After I have finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won’t re-open it. Understand that. You can leave here, for a few days, what you say you have brought here, if you choose; you can take it away at once, if you choose. In case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you—I can replace this matter on its old footing, and I can go so far besides as to give you a written undertaking that this man Bagnet shall never be troubled in any way until you have been proceeded against to the utmost—that your means shall be exhausted before the creditor looks to his. This is in fact all but freeing him. Have you decided?”
The trooper puts his hand into his breast, and answers with a long breath, “I must do it, sir.”
So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his spectacles, sits down and writes the undertaking; which he slowly reads and explains to Bagnet, who has all this time been staring at the ceiling, and who puts his hand on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and seems exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express his sentiments. The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a folded paper, which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer’s elbow. “ ’Tis only a letter of instructions, sir. The last I ever had from him.”
Look at a millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression, and you will find it quite as soon as in the face of Mr. Tulkinghorn when he opens and reads the letter! He refolds it, and lays it in his desk, with a countenance as imperturbable as Death.
Nor has he anything more to say or do, but to nod once in the same frigid and discourteous manner, and to say briefly, “You can go. Show these men out, there!” Being shown out, they repair to Mr. Bagnet’s residence to dine.
Boiled beef and greens constitute the day’s variety on the former repast of boiled pork and greens; and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the meal in the same way, and seasons it with the best of temper: being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better; and catches light from any spot of darkness near her. The spot on this occasion is the darkened brow of Mr. George; he is unusually thoughtful and depressed. At first Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined endearments of Quebec and Malta to restore him; but finding those young ladies sensible that their existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their usual frolicsome acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry, and leaves him to deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic hearth.
But he does not. He remains in close order, clouded and depressed. During the lengthy cleaning up and pattening process, when he and Mr. Bagnet are supplied with their pipes, he is no better than he was at dinner. He forgets to smoke, looks at the fire and ponders, lets his pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with perturbation and dismay, by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco.
Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the invigorating pail, and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, “Old girl!” and winks monitions to her to find out what’s the matter.
“Why, George!” says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly threading her needle. “How low you are!”
“Am I? Not good company? Well, I am afraid I am not.”
“He ain’t at all like Bluffy, mother!” cries little
Malta.
“Because he ain’t well, I think, mother,” adds Quebec.
“Sure that’s a bad sign not to be like Bluffy, too!” returns the trooper, kissing the young damsels. “But it’s true,” with a sigh—“true, I am afraid. These little ones are always right!”
“George,” says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, “if I thought you cross enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier’s wife—who could have bitten her tongue off afterwards, and ought to have done it almost—said this morning, I don’t know what I shouldn’t say to you now.”
“My kind soul of a darling,” returns the trooper. “Not a morsel of it.”
“Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say, was that I trusted Lignum to you, and was sure you’d bring him through it. And you have brought him through it, noble!”
“Thankee, my dear!” says George. “I am glad of your good opinion.”
In giving Mrs. Bagnet’s hand, with her work in it, a friendly shake—for she took her seat beside him—the trooper’s attention is attracted to her face. After looking at it for a little while as she plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his stool in the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.
“See there, my boy,” says George, very gently smoothing the mother’s hair with his hand, “there’s a good loving forehead for you! All bright with love of you, my boy. A little touched by the sun and the weather through following your father about and taking care of you, but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree.”
Mr. Bagnet’s face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies, the highest approbation and acquiescence.
“The time will come, my boy,” pursues the trooper, “when this hair of your mother’s will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles—and a fine old lady she’ll be then. Take care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, ‘I never whitened a hair of her dear head—I never marked a sorrowful line in her face!’ For of all the many things that you can think of when you are a man, you had better have that by you, Woolwich!”
Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry about him, that he’ll smoke his pipe in the street a bit.
CHAPTER 35
ESTHER’S NARRATIVE
I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance. But this was not the effect of time, so much as of the change in all my habits, made by the helplessness and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance, where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.
My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the old duties at Greenleaf, or the summer afternoons when I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm; and my childish shadow at my side, to my godmother’s house. I had never known before how short life really was, and into how small a space the mind could put it.
While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them. I suppose that few who have not been in such a condition can quite understand what I mean, or what painful unrest arose from this source.
For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my disorder—it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both nights and days in it—when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again. I knew perfectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I was in my bed; and I talked with Charley, and felt her touch, and knew her very well; yet I would find myself complaining “O more of these never-ending stairs, Charley,—more and more—piled up to the sky, I think!” and labouring on again.
Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?
Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and the more intelligible I shall be. I do not recall them to make others unhappy, or because I am now the least unhappy in remembering them. It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions, we might be the better able to alleviate their intensity.
The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the blissful rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself, and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying; with no other emotion than with a pitying love for those I left behind—this state can be perhaps more widely understood. I was in this state when I first shrunk from the light as it twinkled on me once more, and knew with a boundless joy for which no words are rapturous enough, that I should see again.
I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her praying and imploring to be let in to nurse and comfort me, and to leave my bedside no more; but I had only said, when I could speak, “Never, my sweet girl, never!” and I had over and over again reminded Charley that she was to keep my darling from the room, whether I lived or died. Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast.
But now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every day more fully and brightly on me, I could read the letters that my dear wrote to me every morning and evening, and could put them to my lips and lay my cheek upon them with no fear of hurting her. I could see my little maid, so tender and so careful, going about the two rooms setting everything in order, and speaking cheerfully to Ada from the open window again. I could understand the stillness in the house, and thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all those who had always been so good to me. I could weep in the exquisite felicity of my heart, and be as happy in my weakness as ever I had been in my strength.
By and by, my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with so strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were done for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a little, and so on to a little more and much more, until I became useful to myself, and interested, and attached to life again.
How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in bed with pillows for the first time, to enjoy a great tea-drinking with Charley! The little creature—sent into the world, surely, to minister to the weak and sick—was so happy, and so busy, and stopped so often in her preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, and fondle me, and cry with joyful tears she was so glad, she was so glad! that I was obliged to say, “Charley, if you go on in this way, I must lie down again, my darling, for I am weaker than I thought I was!” So Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her bright face here and there, across and across the two rooms, out of the shade into the divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shade, while I watched her peacefully. When all her preparations were concluded and the pretty tea-table with its little delicacies to tempt me, and its white cloth, and its flowers, and everything so lovingly and beautifully arranged for me by Ada downstairs, was ready at the bedside, I felt sure I was steady enough to say something to Charley that was not new to my thoughts.
First, I complimented Charley on the room; and indeed, it was so fresh and airy, so spotless and neat, that I could scarce believe I had been lying there
so long. This delighted Charley, and her face was brighter than before.
“Yet, Charley,” said I, looking round, “I miss something, surely, that I am accustomed to?”
Poor little Charley looked round too, and pretended to shake her head, as if there were nothing absent.
“Are the pictures all as they used to be?” I asked her.
“Every one of them, miss,” said Charley.
“And the furniture, Charley?”
“Except where I have moved it about, to make more room, miss.”
“And yet,” said I, “I miss some familiar object. Ah, I know what it is, Charley! It’s the looking-glass.”
Charley got up from the table, making as if she had forgotten something, and went into the next room; and I heard her sob there.
I had thought of this very often. I was now certain of it. I could thank God that it was not a shock to me now. I called Charley back; and when she came—at first pretending to smile, but as she drew nearer to me, looking grieved—I took her in my arms, and said, “It matters very little, Charley. I hope I can do without my old face very well.”
I was presently so far advanced as to be able to sit up in a great chair, and even giddily to walk into the adjoining room, leaning on Charley. The mirror was gone from its usual place in that room too; but what I had to bear, was none the harder to bear for that.
My guardian had throughout been earnest to visit me, and there was now no good reason why I should deny myself that happiness. He came one morning; and when he first came in could only hold me in his embrace, and say, “My dear, dear girl!” I had long known—who could know better?—what a deep fountain of affection and generosity his heart was; and was it not worth my trivial suffering and change to fill such a place in it? “O yes!” I thought. “He has seen me, and he loves me better than he did; he has seen me, and is even fonder of me than he was before; and what have I to mourn for!”
The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White) Page 92