She took my hand and beckoned Richard and Ada to come too, and in a few moments she was at home.
She had stopped at a shop over which was written, "Krook, Rag and Bottle Warehouse." Inside was an old man in spectacles and a hair cap, and entering the shop the little old lady presented him to us.
"My landlord, Krook," she said. "He is called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the Court of Chancery."
She lived at the top of the house in a room from which she had a glimpse of the roof of Lincoln"s Inn Hall, and this seemed to be her princ.i.p.al inducement for living there.
_II.--Bleak House_
We drove down to Bleak House, in Hertfordshire, next day, and all three of us were anxious and nervous when the night closed in, and the driver, pointing to a light sparkling on the top of a hill, cried, "That"s Bleak House!"
"Ada, my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome. Rick, if I had a hand to spare at present I would give it you!"
The gentleman who said these words in a clear, hospitable voice, kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the hall into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire.
"Now, Rick!" said he, "I have a hand at liberty. A word in earnest is as good as a speech. I am heartily glad to see you. You are at home. Warm yourself!"
While he spoke I glanced at his face. It was a handsome face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered iron grey. I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was upright, hearty, and robust.
So this was our coming to Bleak House.
The very next morning I was installed as housekeeper and presented with two bunches of keys--a large bunch for the housekeeping and a little bunch for the cellars. I could not help trembling when I met Mr.
Jarndyce, for I knew it was he who had done everything for me since my G.o.dmother"s death.
"Nonsense!" he said. "I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in all this?"
He soon began to talk to me confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with him every morning for I don"t know how long.
"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don"t understand this Chancery business?"
I shook my head.
"I don"t know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared. Its about a will, and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It"s about nothing but costs now. It was about a will when it was about anything. A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune and made a great will. In the question how the trusts under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything that has acc.u.mulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers, and must go down the middle and up again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch"s sabbath. And we can"t get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and _must be_ parties to it, whether we like it or not. But it won"t do to think of it! Thinking of it drove my great-uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, to blow his brains out."
"I hope sir--" said I.
"I think you had better call me Guardian, my dear."
"I hope, Guardian," said I, giving the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world, "that you may not be trusting too much to my discretion. I am not clever, and that"s the truth."
"You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives here, my dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the rhyme, who sweeps the cobwebs of the sky, and you will sweep them out of _our_ sky in the course of your housekeeping, Esther."
This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort, that my own soon became quite lost.
One of the things I noticed from the first about my guardian was that, though he was always doing a thousand acts of kindness, he could not bear any acknowledgments.
We had somehow got to see more of Miss Flite on our visits to London: for the Lord Chancellor always had to be consulted before Richard could settle in any profession, and as Richard first wanted to be a doctor and then tired of that in favour of the army, there were several consultations. I remember one visit because it was the first time we met Mr. Woodcourt.
My guardian and Ada and I heard of Miss Flite having been ill, and when we called we found a medical gentleman attending her in her garret in Lincoln"s Inn.
Miss Flite dropped a general curtsy.
"Honoured, indeed," she said, "by another visit from the wards in Jarndyce! Very happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my humble roof!"
"Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce in a whisper of the doctor.
"Oh, decidedly unwell!" she answered confidentially. "Not pain, you know--trouble. Only Mr. Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr.
Woodcourt"--with great stateliness--"The wards in Jarndyce; Jarndyce of Bleak House. The kindest physician in the college," she whispered to me.
"I expect a judgment. On the Day of Judgment. And shall then confer estates."
"She will be as well, in a day or two," said Mr. Woodcourt, with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. Have you heard of her good fortune?"
"Most extraordinary!" said Miss Flite. "Every Sat.u.r.day Kenge and Carboy place a paper of shillings in my hand. Always the same number. One for every day in the week. _I_ think that the Lord Chancellor forwards them.
Until the judgment I expect is given."
My guardian was contemplating Miss Flite"s birds, and I had no need to look beyond him.
_III.--I Am Made Happy_
I sometimes thought that Mr. Woodcourt loved me, and that, if he had been richer, he would perhaps have told me that he loved me before he went away. I had thought sometimes that if he had done so I should have been glad. As it was, he went to the East Indies, and later we read in the papers of a great shipwreck, that Allan Woodcourt had worked like a hero to save the drowning, and succour the survivors.
I had been ill when my dear guardian asked me one day if I would care to read something he had written, and I said "Yes." There was estrangement at that time between Richard and Mr. Jarndyce, for the unhappy boy had taken it into his head that the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce would yet be settled, and would bring him fortune, and this kept him from devoting himself seriously to any profession. Of course, he and my darling Ada had fallen in love, and my guardian insisting on their waiting till Richard was earning some income before any engagement could be recognised, increased the estrangement. I knew, to my distress, that Richard suspected my guardian of having a conflicting claim in the horrible lawsuit and this made him think unjustly of Mr. Jarndyce.
I read the letter. It was so impressive in its love for me, and in the unselfish caution it gave me, that my eyes were too often blinded to read much at a time. But I read it through three times before I laid it down. It asked me would I be the mistress of Bleak House. It was not a love-letter, though it expressed so much love, but was written just as he would at any time have spoken to me.
I felt that to devote my life to his happiness was to thank him poorly for all he had done for me. Still I cried very much; not only in the fulness of my heart after reading the letter, but as if something for which there was no name or distinct idea were lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful, but I cried very much.
On entering the breakfast-room next morning I found my guardian just as usual; quite as frank, as open, as free. I thought he might speak to me about the letter, but he never did.
At the end of a week I went to him and said, rather hesitating and trembling, "Guardian, when would you like to have the answer to the letter?"
"When it"s ready, my dear," he replied.
"I think it"s ready," said I, "and I have brought it myself."
I put my two arms around his neck and kissed him, and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House? And I said "Yes," and it made no difference presently, and I said nothing to my pet, Ada, about it.
It was a few days after this, when Mr. Vholes, the attorney whom Richard employed to watch his interests, called at Bleak House, and told us that his client was very embarra.s.sed financially, and so thought of throwing up his commission in the army.
To avert this I went down to Deal and found Richard alone in the barracks. He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin cases, books, boots, and brushes strewn all about the floor. So worn and haggard he looked, even in the fulness of his handsome youth!
My mission was quite fruitless.
"No, Dame Durden! Two subjects I forbid. The first is John Jarndyce. The second, you know what. Call it madness, and I tell you I can"t help it now, and can"t be sane. But it is no such thing; it is the one object I have to pursue."