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Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (1852-1853) - Chapter 5 - A
Morning Adventure
CHAPTER V
A Morning Adventure
Although the morning was raw, and although the fog
still seemed heavy--I say seemed, for the windows were so encrusted with dirt
that they would have made midsummer sunshine dim--I was sufficiently forewarned
of the discomfort within doors at that early hour and sufficiently curious about
London to think it a good idea on the part of Miss Jellyby when she proposed
that we should go out for a walk.
"Ma won't be down for ever so long," she said,
"and then it's a chance if breakfast's ready for an hour afterwards, they
dawdle so. As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office. He never has
what you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla leaves him out the loaf and
some milk, when there is any, overnight. Sometimes there isn't any milk, and
sometimes the cat drinks it. But I'm afraid you must be tired, Miss Summerson,
and perhaps you would rather go to bed."
"I am not at all tired, my dear," said I,
"and would much prefer to go out."
"If you're sure you would," returned Miss
Jellyby, "I'll get my things on."
Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir. I made a
proposal to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that
he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this
he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at me during the whole
operation as if he never had been, and never could again be, so astonished in
his life--looking very miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and
going snugly to sleep as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about
taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely
to notice it.
What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle
of getting myself ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We found
Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing- room, which
Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour candlestick, throwing the
candle in to make it burn better. Everything was just as we had left it last
night and was evidently intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had
not been taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and
waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the
area railings; the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner coming
out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that
she had been to see what o'clock it was.
But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was
dancing up and down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to
see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk. So he took care
of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may mention that Miss Jellyby had
relapsed into her sulky manner and that I really should not have thought she
liked me much unless she had told me so.
"Where would you wish to go?" she asked.
"Anywhere, my dear," I replied.
"Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby,
stopping perversely.
"Let us go somewhere at any rate," said I.
She then walked me on very fast.
"I don't care!" she said. "Now, you are
my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don't care-but if he was to come to our
house with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he was as
old as Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything to say to him. Such ASSES as he and
Ma make of themselves!"
"My dear!" I remonstrated, in allusion to the
epithet and the vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. "Your duty as a
child--"
"Oh! Don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson;
where's Ma's duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I
suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more
their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I shocked
too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!"
She walked me on faster yet.
"But for all that, I say again, he may come, and
come, and come, and I won't have anything to say to him. I can't bear him. If
there's any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it's the stuff he and Ma
talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our house can have the patience
to stay there and be a witness of such inconsistencies and contradictions as all
that sounding nonsense, and Ma's management!"
I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale,
the young gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the
disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada coming up at a
round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to run a race. Thus interrupted,
Miss Jellyby became silent and walked moodily on at my side while I admired the
long successions and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going
to and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations
in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the
extraordinary creatures in rags secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for
pins and other refuse.
"So, cousin," said the cheerful voice of
Richard to Ada behind me. "We are never to get out of Chancery! We have
come by another way to our place of meeting yesterday, and--by the Great Seal,
here's the old lady again!"
Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us,
curtsying, and smiling, and saying with her yesterday's air of patronage,
"The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!"
"You are out early, ma'am," said I as she
curtsied to me.
"Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court
sits. It's retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the
day," said the old lady mincingly. "The business of the day requires a
great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to follow."
"Who's this, Miss Summerson?" whispered Miss
Jellyby, drawing my arm tighter through her own.
The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick. She
answered for herself directly.
"A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the
honour to attend court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of
addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?" said the old lady,
recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a very low curtsy.
Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of
yesterday, good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with the
suit.
"Ha!" said the old lady. "She does not
expect a judgment? She will still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This
is the garden of Lincoln's Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower in the
summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater part of the
long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long vacation exceedingly
long, don't you?"
We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.
"When the leaves are falling from the trees and
there are no more flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord
Chancellor's court," said the old lady, "the vacation is fulfilled and
the sixth seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and see
my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope, and beauty are very
seldom there. It is a long, long time since I had a visit from either."
She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby
away, beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse myself
and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and half curious and all in
doubt how to get rid of the old lady without offence, she continued to lead us
away, and he and Ada continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us
all the time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.
It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so
close by that we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments
before she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady
stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes
immediately outside the wall of the inn, and said, "This is my lodging.
Pray walk up!"
She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK,
RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE
STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a
cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the
inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON
BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S
WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there.
In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles--blacking bottles,
medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda- water bottles, pickle bottles, wine
bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had
in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of
being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There
were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old
volumes outside the door, labelled "Law Books, all at 9d." Some of the
inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had
seen in Kenge and Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from
the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the
business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five
wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to
Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and
red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled
parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers. I could have
fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled
together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in
lawyers' offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a
one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might
have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as
Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones
in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to
make the picture complete.
As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was
blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, intercepting the light within a
couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that
an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning
towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and
withered, with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath
issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His
throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with
veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root
in a fall of snow.
"Hi, hi!" said the old man, coming to the
door. "Have you anything to sell?"
We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress,
who had been trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her
pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the pleasure of seeing
where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for time. But she was not to
be so easily left. She became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her
entreaties that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was
so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she
desired, that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply.
I suppose we were all more or less curious; at any rate, when the old man added
his persuasions to hers and said, "Aye, aye! Please her! It won't take a
minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the shop if t'other door's out of
order!" we all went in, stimulated by Richard's laughing encouragement and
relying on his protection.
"My landlord, Krook," said the little old
lady, condescending to him from her lofty station as she presented him to us.
"He is called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called
the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh, I
assure you he is very odd!"
She shook her head a great many times and tapped her
forehead with her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to
excuse him, "For he is a little--you know--M!" said the old lady with
great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.
"It's true enough," he said, going before us
with the lantern, "that they call me the lord chancellor and call my shop
Chancery. And why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop
Chancery?"
"I don't know, I am sure!" said Richard rather
carelessly.
"You see," said the old man, stopping and
turning round, "they--Hi! Here's lovely hair! I have got three sacks of
ladies' hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and
what texture!"
"That'll do, my good friend!" said Richard,
strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada's tresses through his
yellow hand. "You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that
liberty."
The old man darted at him a sudden look which even
called my attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably
beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady
herself. But as Ada interposed and laughingly said she could only feel proud of
such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he
had leaped out of it.
"You see, I have so many things here," he
resumed, holding up the lantern, "of so many kinds, and all as the
neighbours think (but THEY know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and
ruin, that that's why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have
so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust
and must and cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I can't abear to
part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do
THEY know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor
cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill name
of Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well
every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him.
There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady
Jane!"
A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on
his shoulder and startled us all.
"Hi! Show 'em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my
lady!" said her master.
The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with
her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.
"She'd do as much for any one I was to set her
on," said the old man. "I deal in cat-skins among other general
matters, and hers was offered to me. It's a very fine skin, as you may see, but
I didn't have it stripped off! THAT warn't like Chancery practice though, says
you!"
He had by this time led us across the shop, and now
opened a door in the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood
with his hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him
before passing out, "That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are tiresome.
My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare myself, having to
attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in Jarndyce."
"Jarndyce!" said the old man with a start.
"Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook,"
returned his lodger.
"Hi!" exclaimed the old man in a tone of
thoughtful amazement and with a wider stare than before. "Think of
it!"
He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so
curiously at us that Richard said, "Why, you appear to trouble yourself a
good deal about the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other
Chancellor!"
"Yes," said the old man abstractedly.
"Sure! YOUR name now will be--"
"Richard Carstone."
"Carstone," he repeated, slowly checking off
that name upon his forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon
a separate finger. "Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of
Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think."
"He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried
Chancellor!" said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.
"Aye!" said the old man, coming slowly out of
his abstraction. "Yes! Tom Jarndyce--you'll excuse me, being related; but
he was never known about court by any other name, and was as well known there
as--she is now," nodding slightly at his lodger. "Tom Jarndyce was
often in here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause
was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers and telling 'em to keep
out of Chancery, whatever they did. 'For,' says he, 'it's being ground to bits
in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by
single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.' He was as
near making away with himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could
be."
We listened with horror.
"He come in at the door," said the old man,
slowly pointing an imaginary track along the shop, "on the day he did
it--the whole neighbourhood had said for months before that he would do it, of a
certainty sooner or later--he come in at the door that day, and walked along
there, and sat himself on a bench that stood there, and asked me (you'll judge I
was a mortal sight younger then) to fetch him a pint of wine. 'For,' says he, 'Krook,
I am much depressed; my cause is on again, and I think I'm nearer judgment than
I ever was.' I hadn't a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to
the tavern over the way there, t'other side my lane (I mean Chancery Lane); and
I followed and looked in at the window, and saw him, comfortable as I thought,
in the arm-chair by the fire, and company with him. I hadn't hardly got back
here when I heard a shot go echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran
out--neighbours ran out--twenty of us cried at once, 'Tom Jarndyce!'"
The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into
the lantern, blew the light out, and shut the lantern up.
"We were right, I needn't tell the present hearers.
Hi! To be sure, how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while the
cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of 'em, grubbed
and muddled away as usual and tried to look as if they hadn't heard a word of
the last fact in the case or as if they had--Oh, dear me!--nothing at all to do
with it if they had heard of it by any chance!"
Ada's colour had entirely left her, and Richard was
scarcely less pale. Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was
no party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh it was a shock to come
into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended in the minds of many
people with such dreadful recollections. I had another uneasiness, in the
application of the painful story to the poor half-witted creature who had
brought us there; but, to my surprise, she seemed perfectly unconscious of that
and only led the way upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a
superior creature for the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord was
"a little M, you know!"
She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large
room, from which she had a glimpse of Lincoln's Inn Hall. This seemed to have
been her principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there.
She could look at it, she said, in the night, especially in the moonshine. Her
room was clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the
way of furniture; a few old prints from books, of Chancellors and barristers,
wafered against the wall; and some half-dozen reticles and work-bags,
"containing documents," as she informed us. There were neither coals
nor ashes in the grate, and I saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind
of food. Upon a shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and
so forth, but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in her
pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood before.
"Extremely honoured, I am sure," said our poor
hostess with the greatest suavity, "by this visit from the wards in
Jarndyce. And very much indebted for the omen. It is a retired situation.
Considering. I am limited as to situation. In consequence of the necessity of
attending on the Chancellor. I have lived here many years. I pass my days in
court, my evenings and my nights here. I find the nights long, for I sleep but
little and think much. That is, of course, unavoidable, being in Chancery. I am
sorry I cannot offer chocolate. I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place
my establishment on a superior footing. At present, I don't mind confessing to
the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult
to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt
something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the
introduction of such mean topics."
She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low
garret window and called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there,
some containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and goldfinches--I
should think at least twenty.
"I began to keep the little creatures," she
said, "with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the
intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye- es!
They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in
comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has
died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though
they are all young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?"
Although she sometimes asked a question, she never
seemed to expect a reply, but rambled on as if she were in the habit of doing so
when no one but herself was present.
"Indeed," she pursued, "I positively
doubt sometimes, I do assure you, whether while matters are still unsettled, and
the sixth or Great Seal still prevails, I may not one day be found lying stark
and senseless here, as I have found so many birds!"
Richard, answering what he saw in Ada's compassionate
eyes, took the opportunity of laying some money, softly and unobserved, on the
chimney-piece. We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to examine the birds.
"I can't allow them to sing much," said the
little old lady, "for (you'll think this curious) I find my mind confused
by the idea that they are singing while I am following the arguments in court.
And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know! Another time, I'll tell you
their names. Not at present. On a day of such good omen, they shall sing as much
as they like. In honour of youth," a smile and curtsy, "hope," a
smile and curtsy, "and beauty," a smile and curtsy. "There! We'll
let in the full light."
The birds began to stir and chirp.
"I cannot admit the air freely," said the
little old lady--the room was close, and would have been the better for
it--"because the cat you saw downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for
their lives. She crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have
discovered," whispering mysteriously, "that her natural cruelty is
sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty. In consequence of
the judgment I expect being shortly given. She is sly and full of malice. I half
believe, sometimes, that she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so
very difficult to keep her from the door."
Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it
was half- past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to an end
than we could easily have done for ourselves. She hurriedly took up her little
bag of documents, which she had laid upon the table on coming in, and asked if
we were also going into court. On our answering no, and that we would on no
account detain her, she opened the door to attend us downstairs.
"With such an omen, it is even more necessary than
usual that I should be there before the Chancellor comes in," said she,
"for he might mention my case the first thing. I have a presentiment that
he WILL mention it the first thing this morning"
She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going
down that the whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had
bought piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a little M.
This was on the first floor. But she had made a previous stoppage on the second
floor and had silently pointed at a dark door there.
"The only other lodger," she now whispered in
explanation, "a law- writer. The children in the lanes here say he has sold
himself to the devil. I don't know what he can have done with the money.
Hush!"
She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her
even there, and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe as though
even the sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said.
Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had
passed through it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of
packets of waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be working
hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a piece of chalk
by him, with which, as he put each separate package or bundle down, he made a
crooked mark on the panelling of the wall.
Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old
lady had gone by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me,
and chalked the letter J upon the wall--in a very curious manner, beginning with
the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a
printed one, but just such a letter as any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's
office would have made.
"Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen
glance.
"Surely," said I. "It's very plain."
"What is it?"
"J."
With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he
rubbed it out and turned an "a" in its place (not a capital letter
this time), and said, "What's that?"
I told him. He then rubbed that out and turned the
letter "r," and asked me the same question. He went on quickly until
he had formed in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of
the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on the wall
together.
"What does that spell?" he asked me.
When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet
with the same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the
letters forming the words Bleak House. These, in some astonishment, I also read;
and he laughed again.
"Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the
chalk. "I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can
neither read nor write."
He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly
at me, as if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite
relieved by Richard's appearing at the door and saying, "Miss Summerson, I
hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair. Don't be tempted. Three
sacks below are quite enough for Mr. Krook!"
I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning and
joining my friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who gave
us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance of yesterday in
reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada and me. Before we finally
turned out of those lanes, we looked back and saw Mr. Krook standing at his
shop-door, in his spectacles, looking after us, with his cat upon his shoulder,
and her tail sticking up on one side of his hairy cap like a tall feather.
"Quite an adventure for a morning in London!"
said Richard with a sigh. "Ah, cousin, cousin, it's a weary word this
Chancery!"
"It is to me, and has been ever since I can
remember," returned Ada. "I am grieved that I should be the enemy---as
I suppose I am --of a great number of relations and others, and that they should
be my enemies--as I suppose they are--and that we should all be ruining one
another without knowing how or why and be in constant doubt and discord all our
lives. It seems very strange, as there must be right somewhere, that an honest
judge in real earnest has not been able to find out through all these years
where it is."
"Ah, cousin!" said Richard. "Strange,
indeed! All this wasteful, wanton chess-playing IS very strange. To see that
composed court yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the wretchedness
of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both together.
My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor
rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be either. But at all
events, Ada--I may call you Ada?"
"Of course you may, cousin Richard."
"At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad
influences on US. We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good
kinsman, and it can't divide us now!"
"Never, I hope, cousin Richard!" said Ada
gently.
Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very
significant look. I smiled in return, and we made the rest of the way back very
pleasantly.
In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby
appeared; and in the course of an hour the various things necessary for
breakfast straggled one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs.
Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she presented no
appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly occupied during
breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy correspondence relative to
Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she said) to pass a busy day. The
children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs,
which were perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour
and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The equable
manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and his restoration to
the family circle surprised us all.
She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy,
and Caddy was fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found her.
At one o'clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart for our luggage. Mrs.
Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to her good friend Mr. Jarndyce; Caddy
left her desk to see us depart, kissed me in the passage, and stood biting her
pen and sobbing on the steps; Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep and spared
the pain of separation (I was not without misgivings that he had gone to Newgate
market in search of me); and all the other children got up behind the barouche
and fell off, and we saw them, with great concern, scattered over the surface of
Thavies Inn as we rolled out of its precincts.