Bleak House

I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very diligent.

One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the parlour-door and called me back. Sitting with her, I found – which was very unusual indeed – a stranger. A portly, important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon his little finger.

“This,” said my godmother in an undertone, “is the child.” Then she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, “This is Esther, sir.”

The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, “Come here, my dear!” He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, “Ah!” and afterwards “Yes!” And then, taking off his eye-glasses and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, “You may go upstairs, Esther!” And I made him my curtsy and left him.

It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o'clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.

“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them, 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!'”

I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of the book, “'Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!'”

In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had sounded through the house and been heard in the street.

She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened.

On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman in black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never gone away.

“My name is Kenge,” he said; “you may remember it, my child; Kenge and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn.”

I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.

“Pray be seated – here near me. Don't distress yourself; it's of no use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted with the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her and that this young lady, now her aunt is dead – ”

“My aunt, sir!”

“It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to be gained by it,” said Mr. Kenge smoothly, “Aunt in fact, though not in law. Don't distress yourself! Don't weep! Don't tremble! Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of – the – a – Jarndyce and Jarndyce.”

“Never,” said Mrs. Rachael.

“Is it possible,” pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses, “that our young friend – I BEG you won't distress yourself! – never heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!”

I shook my head, wondering even what it was.

“Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?” said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he were petting something. “Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce – the – a – in itself a monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs. Rachael” – I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I appeared inattentive – “amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty THOUSAND POUNDS!” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair.

I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even then.

“And she really never heard of the cause!” said Mr. Kenge. “Surprising!”

“Miss Barbary, sir,” returned Mrs. Rachael, “who is now among the Seraphim – ”

“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr. Kenge politely.

“ – Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her. And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more.”

“Well!” said Mr. Kenge. “Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the point,” addressing me. “Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. Rachael – ”

“Oh, dear no!” said Mrs. Rachael quickly.

“Quite so,” assented Mr. Kenge; “ – that Mrs. Rachael should charge herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't distress yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself by any stretch of my professional caution?” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and looking calmly at us both.

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much impressed by him – even then, before I knew that he formed himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and that he was generally called Conversation Kenge.

“Mr. Jarndyce,” he pursued, “being aware of the – I would say, desolate – position of our young friend, offers to place her at a first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed, where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has pleased – shall I say Providence? – to call her.”

My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though I tried.

“Mr. Jarndyce,” he went on, “makes no condition beyond expressing his expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge and concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which she will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the paths of virtue and honour, and – the – a – so forth.”

I was still less able to speak than before.

“Now, what does our young friend say?” proceeded Mr. Kenge. “Take time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!”

What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could never relate.

This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as I knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years and ought to have made myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch – it was a very frosty day – I felt so miserable and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!

“No, Esther!” she returned. “It is your misfortune!”

The coach was at the little lawn-gate – we had not come out until we heard the wheels – and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the window through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her own shawl and quietly laid her – I am half ashamed to tell it – in the garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.

When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the other window and took no notice of me.

I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”

I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a whisper, “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window.

“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.

“I didn't know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.

“But you are!” said the gentleman. “Look here!” He came quite opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet.

“There! Now you know you are,” he said. “Don't you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And what are you crying for?” said the gentleman, “Don't you want to go there?”

“Where, sir?”

“Where? Why, wherever you are going,” said the gentleman.