Mr. Tulkinghorn, in his search to find out the woman who had hired Joe to show her the cemetery, had dogged him so with his detective that at length the lad had become frightened and left London for the open country. There he was taken very ill, and on the highway near Bleak House one evening Esther found him helpless and delirious with fever.
Touched by his condition she had him taken at once to Bleak House and put to bed, intending when morning came to send for a doctor.
But in the morning little Joe was missing. Though they searched high and low he was not to be found, and they decided that in his delirium he had taken to the road again. It was not till long after that Esther found his leaving had been brought about by Harold Skimpole, who was then visiting Bleak House, and who, in his selfishness, feared the boy might be the bearer of some contagious disease.
This unfortunately proved to be the case. Joe"s illness was smallpox, and a few days later a maid of Esther"s fell ill with it. Esther nursed her day and night, and just as she was recovering was stricken with it herself.
In her unselfishness and love for the rest, before unconsciousness came, she made the maid promise faithfully to allow no one (particularly neither Mr. Jarndyce nor her beloved Ada) to enter the room till all danger was past.
For many days Esther hovered between life and death and all the time the maid kept her word. Caddy came from the Turveydrop dancing school early and late, and little Miss Flite walked the twenty miles from London in thin shoes to inquire for her. And at length, slowly, she began to grow well again.
But the disease had left its terrible mark. When she first looked in a mirror she found that her beauty was gone and her face strangely altered.
This was a great grief to her at first, but on the day when Mr.
Jarndyce came into her sick-room and held her in his arms and said, "My dear, dear girl!" she thought, "He has seen me and is fonder of me than before. So what have I to mourn for?" She thought of Allan Woodcourt, too, the young surgeon somewhere on the sea, and she was glad that, if he had loved her before he sailed away, he had not told her so. Now, she told herself, when they met again and he saw her so sadly changed he would have given her no promise he need regret.
When she was able to travel, Esther went for a short stay at the house of Mr. Boythorn, and there, walking under the trees she grew stronger.
One day, as she sat in the park that surrounded the house, she saw Lady Dedlock coming toward her, and seeing how pale and agitated she was, Esther felt the same odd sensation she had felt in the church. Lady Dedlock threw herself sobbing at her feet, and put her arms around her and kissed her, as she told her that she was her unhappy mother, who must keep her secret for the sake of her husband, Sir Leicester.
Esther thought her heart must break with both grief and joy at once. But she comforted Lady Dedlock, and told her nothing would ever change her love for her, and they parted with tears and kisses.
Another surprise of a different sort awaited Esther on her return to Bleak House. Mr. Jarndyce told her that he loved her and asked her if she would marry him. And, remembering how tender he had always been, and knowing that he loved her in spite of her disfigured face, she said yes.
But one day--the very day he returned--Esther saw Allan Woodcourt on the street. Somehow at the first glimpse of him she knew that she had loved him all along. Then she remembered that she had promised to marry Mr.
Jarndyce, and she began to tremble and ran away without speaking to Woodcourt at all.
But they soon met, and this time it was Joe the crossing sweeper who brought them together. Woodcourt found the poor ragged wanderer in the street, so ill that he could hardly walk. He had recovered from smallpox, but it had left him so weak that he had become a prey to consumption. The kind-hearted surgeon took the boy to little Miss Flite and they found him a place to stay in Mr. George"s shooting-gallery, where they did what they could for him, and where Esther and Mr.
Jarndyce came to see him.
Joe was greatly troubled when he learned he had brought the smallpox to Bleak House, and one day he got some one to write out for him in very large letters that he was sorry and hoped Esther and all the others would forgive him. And this was his will.
On the last day Allan Woodcourt sat beside him, "Joe, my poor fellow,"
he said.
"I hear you, sir, but it"s dark--let me catch your hand."
"Joe, can you say what I say?"
"I"ll say anything as you do, sir, for I know it"s good."
"Our Father."
"Our Father; yes, that"s very good, sir."
"Which art in Heaven."
"Art in Heaven. Is the light a-comin", sir?"
"Hallowed be thy name."
"Hallowed be--thy----"
But the light had come at last. Little Joe was dead.
IV
ESTHER BECOMES THE MISTRESS OF BLEAK HOUSE
When the last bit of proof was fast in his possession Mr. Tulkinghorn, pluming himself on the cleverness with which he had wormed his way into Lady Dedlock"s secret, went to her at her London home and informed her of all he had discovered, delighting in the fear and dread which she could not help showing. She knew now that this cruel man would always hold his knowledge over her head, torturing her with the threat of making it known to her husband.
Some hours after he had gone home, she followed him there to beg him not to tell her husband what he had discovered. But all was dark in the lawyer"s house. She rang the private bell twice, but there was no answer, and she returned in despair.
By a coincidence some one else had been seen to call at Mr.
Tulkinghorn"s that same night. This was Mr. George, of the shooting-gallery, who came to get back the letter he had loaned to the lawyer.
When morning came it was found that a dreadful deed had been done that night. Mr. Tulkinghorn was found lying dead on the floor of his private apartment, shot through the heart. All the secrets he had so cunningly discovered and gloated over with such delight had not been able to save his life there in that room.
Mr. Tulkinghorn was so well-known that the murder made a great sensation. The police went at once to the shooting-gallery to arrest Mr.
George and he was put into jail.
He was able later to prove his innocence, however, and, all in all, his arrest turned out to be a fortunate thing. For by means of it old Mrs.
Rouncewell, Lady Dedlock"s housekeeper, discovered that he was her own son George, who had gone off to be a soldier so many years before. He had made up his mind not to return till he was prospering. But somehow this time had never come; bad fortune had followed him and he had been ashamed to go back.
But though he had acted so wrongly he had never lost his love for his mother, and was glad to give up the shooting-gallery and go with Mrs.
Rouncewell to become Sir Leicester"s personal attendant.
At first, after the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock had hoped that her dread and fear were now ended, but she soon found that this was not to be. The telltale bundle of letters was in the possession of a detective whom the cruel lawyer had long ago called to his aid, and the detective, thinking Lady Dedlock herself might have had something to do with the murder, thought it his duty to tell all that his dead employer had discovered to Sir Leicester.
It was a fearful shock to the haughty baronet to find so many tongues had been busy with the name his wife had borne so proudly. When the detective finished, Sir Leicester fell unconscious, and when he came to his senses had lost the power to speak.
They laid him on his bed, sent for doctors and went to tell Lady Dedlock, but she had disappeared.
Almost at one and the same moment the unhappy woman had learned not only that the detective had told his story to Sir Leicester, but that she herself was suspected of the murder. These two blows were more than she could bear. She put on a cloak and veil and, leaving all her money and jewels behind her, with a note for her husband, went out into the shrill, frosty wind. The note read:
"If I am sought for or accused of his murder, believe I am wholly innocent. I have no home left, I will trouble you no more. May you forget me and forgive me."
They gave Sir Leicester this note, and great agony came to the stricken man"s heart. He had always loved and honored her, and he loved her no less now for what had been told him. Nor did he believe for a moment that she could be guilty of the murder. He wrote on a slate the words, "Forgive--find," and the detective started at once to overtake the fleeing woman.
He went first to Esther, to whom he told the sad outcome, and together they began the search. For two days they labored, tracing Lady Dedlock"s movements step by step, through the pelting snow and wind, across the frozen wastes outside of London, where brick-kilns burned and where she had exchanged clothes with a poor laboring woman, the better to elude pursuit--then back to London again, where at last they found her.
But it was too late. She was lying frozen in the snow, at the gate of the cemetery where Captain Hawdon, the copyist whom she had once loved, lay buried.
So Lady Dedlock"s secret was hidden at last by death. Only the detective, whose business was silence, Sir Leicester her husband, and Esther her daughter, knew what her misery had been or the strange circ.u.mstances of her flight, for the police soon succeeded in tracing the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn to Hortense, the revengeful French maid whom he had threatened to put in prison.
One other shadow fell on Esther"s life before the clouds cleared away for ever.
Grandfather Smallweed, rummaging among the papers in Krook"s shop, found an old will, and this proved to be a last will made by the original Jarndyce, whose affairs the Court of Chancery had been all these years trying to settle. This will bequeathed the greater part of the fortune to Richard Carstone, and its discovery, of course, would have put a stop to the famous suit.