The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “Better to say at once, sir,” returned Richard, “that you renounce all confidence in me, and that you advise Ada to do the same.”

  “Better to say nothing of the sort, Rick, because I don’t mean it.”

  “You think I have begun ill, sir,” retorted Richard. “I have, I know.”

  “How I hoped you would begin, and how go on, I told you when we spoke of these things last,” said Mr. Jarndyce, in a cordial and encouraging manner. “You have not made that beginning yet; but there is a time for all things, and yours is not gone by—rather, it is just now fully come. Make a clear beginning altogether. You two (very young, my dears) are cousins. As yet, you are nothing more: What more may come, must come of being worked out, Rick; and no sooner.”

  “You are very hard with me, sir,” said Richard. “Harder than I could have supposed you would be.”

  “My dear boy,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “I am harder with myself when I do anything that gives you pain. You have your remedy in your own hands. Ada, it is better for him that he should be free, and that there should be no youthful engagement between you. Rick, it is better for her, much better; you owe it to her. Come! Each of you will do what is best for the other, if not what is best for yourselves.”

  “Why is it best, sir?” returned Richard, hastily. “It was not, when we opened our hearts to you. You did not say so, then.”

  “I have had experience since. I don’t blame you, Rick—but I have had experience since.”

  “You mean of me, sir.”

  “Well! Yes, of both of you,” said Mr. Jarndyce, kindly. “The time is not come for your standing pledged to one another. It is not right, and I must recognize it. Come, come, my young cousins, begin afresh! Bygones shall be bygones, and a new page turned for you to write your lives in.”

  Richard gave an anxious glance at Ada, but said nothing.

  “I have avoided saying one word to either of you, or to Esther,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “until now, in order that we might be open as the day, and all on equal terms. I now affectionately advise, I now most earnestly entreat, you two, to part as you came here. Leave all else to time, truth, and steadfastness. If you do otherwise, you will do wrong; and you will have made me do wrong, in ever bringing you together.”

  A long silence succeeded.

  “Cousin Richard,” said Ada, then, raising her blue eyes tenderly to his face, “after what our cousin John has said, I think no choice is left us. Your mind may be quite at ease about me; for you will leave me here under his care, and will be sure that I can have nothing to wish for; quite sure, if I guide myself by his advice. I—I don’t doubt, cousin Richard,” said Ada, a little confused, “that you are very fond of me, and I—I don’t think you will fall in love with anybody else. But I should like you to consider well about it too; as I should like you to be in all things very happy. You may trust in me, cousin Richard. I am not at all changeable; but I am not unreasonable, and should never blame you. Even cousins may be sorry to part; and in truth I am very, very sorry, Richard, though I know it’s for your welfare. I shall always think of you affectionately, and often talk of you with Esther, and—and perhaps you will sometimes think a little of me, cousin Richard. So now,” said Ada, going up to him and giving him her trembling hand, “we are only cousins again, Richard—for the time perhaps—and I pray for a blessing on my dear cousin, wherever he goes!”

  It was strange to me that Richard should not be able to forgive my guardian, for entertaining the very same opinion of him which he himself had expressed of himself in much stronger terms to me. But it was certainly the case. I observed, with great regret, that from this hour he never was as free and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had been before. He had every reason given him to be so, but he was not; and, solely on his side, an estrangement began to arise between them.

  In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost himself, and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in Hertfordshire, while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a week. He remembered her by fits and starts, even with bursts of tears; and at such times would confide to me the heaviest self-reproaches. But, in a few minutes he would recklessly conjure up some undefinable means by which they were both to be made rich and happy for ever, and would become as gay as possible.

  It was a busy time, and I trotted about with him all day long, buying a variety of things, of which he stood in need. Of the things he would have bought, if he had been left to his own ways, I say nothing. He was perfectly confidential with me, and often talked so sensibly and feelingly about his faults and his vigorous resolutions, and dwelt so much upon the encouragement he derived from these conversations, that I could never have been tired if I had tried.

  There used, in that week, to come backward and forward to our lodging, to fence with Richard, a person who had formerly been a cavalry soldier; he was a fine bluff-looking man, of a frank free bearing, with whom Richard had practiced for some months. I heard so much about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian too, that I was purposely in the room, with my work, one morning after breakfast when he came.

  “Good morning, Mr. George,” said my guardian, who happened to be alone with me. “Mr. Carstone will be here directly. Meanwhile, Miss Summerson is very happy to see you, I know. Sit down.”

  He sat down, a little disconcerted by my presence, I thought; and, without looking at me drew his heavy sunburnt hand across and across his upper lip.

  “You are as punctual as the sun,” said Mr. Jarndyce.

  “Military time, sir,” he replied. “Force of habit. A mere habit in me, sir. I am not at all business-like.”

  “Yet you have a large establishment, too, I am told?” said Mr. Jarndyce.

  “Not much of a one, sir. I keep a shooting gallery, but not much of a one.”

  “And what kind of a shot, and what kind of a swordsman, do you make of Mr. Carstone?” said my guardian.

  “Pretty good, sir,” he replied, folding his arms upon his broad chest, and looking very large. “If Mr. Carstone was to give his full mind to it, he would come out very good.”

  “But he don’t, I suppose?” said my guardian.

  “He did at first, sir, but not afterwards. Not his full mind. Perhaps he has something else upon it—some young lady, perhaps.” His bright dark eyes glanced at me for the first time.

  “He has not me upon his mind, I assure you, Mr. George,” said I, laughing, “though you seem to suspect me.”

  He reddened a little through his brown, and made me a trooper’s bow. “No offence, I hope, miss. I am one of the Roughs.”

  “Not at all,” said I. “I take it as a compliment.”

  If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now, in three or four quick successive glances. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to my guardian, with a manly kind of diffidence, “but you did me the honour to mention the young lady’s name—”

  “Miss Summerson.”

  “Miss Summerson,” he repeated, and looked at me again.

  “Do you know the name?” I asked.

  “No, miss. To my knowledge I never heard it. I thought I had seen you somewhere.”

  “I think not,” I returned, raising my head from my work to look at him; and there was something so genuine in his speech and manner that I was glad of the opportunity. “I remember faces very well.”

  “So do I, miss!” he returned, meeting my look with the fullness of his dark eyes and broad forehead. “Humph! What set me off, now, upon that!”

  His once more reddening through his brown, and being disconcerted by his efforts to remember the association, brought my guardian to his relief.

  “Have you many pupils, Mr. George?”

  “They vary in their number, sir. Mostly, they’re but a small lot to live by.”

  “And what classes of chance people come to practice at your gallery?”

  “All sorts, sir. Natives and foreigners. From gentlemen to ’prentices. I have had French women come, before no
w, and show themselves dabs at pistol-shooting. Mad people out of number, of course—but they go everywhere, where the doors stand open.”

  “People don’t come with grudges and schemes of finishing their practice with live targets, I hope?” said my guardian, smiling.

  “Not much of that, sir, though that has happened. Mostly they come for skill—or idleness. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other. I beg your pardon,” said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright, and squaring an elbow on each knee, “but I believe you’re a Chancery suitor, if I have heard correct?”

  “I am sorry to say I am.”

  “I have had one of your compatriots in my time, sir.”

  “A Chancery suitor?” returned my guardian. “How was that?”

  “Why, the man was so badgered, and worried, and tortured, by being knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post,” said Mr. George, “that he got out of sorts. I don’t believe he had any idea of taking aim at anybody; but he was in that condition of resentment and violence, that he would come and pay for fifty shots, and fire away till he was red hot. One day I said to him when there was nobody by, and he had been talking to me angrily about his wrongs, ‘If this practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well and good; but I don’t altogether like your being so bent upon it, in your present state of mind; I’d rather you took to something else.’ I was on my guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he received it in very good part, and left off directly. We shook hands, and struck up a sort of friendship.”

  “What was that man?” asked my guardian, in a new tone of interest.

  “Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer, before they made a baited bull of him,” said Mr. George.

  “Was his name Gridley?”

  “It was, sir.”

  Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at me, as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the coincidence; and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name. He made me another of his soldierly bows, in acknowledgment of what he called my condescension.

  “I don’t know,” he said, as he looked at me, “what it is that sets me off again—but—bosh! what’s my head running against!” He passed one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair, as if to sweep the broken thoughts out of his mind; and sat a little forward, with one arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a brown study at the ground.

  “I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this Gridley into new troubles, and that he is in hiding,” said my guardian.

  “So I am told, sir,” returned Mr. George, still musing and looking on the ground. “So I am told.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “No, sir,” returned the trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out of his reverie. “I can’t say anything about him. He will be worn out soon, I expect. You may file a strong man’s heart away for a good many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at last.”

  Richard’s entrance stopped the conversation. Mr. George rose, made me another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day, and strode heavily out of the room.

  This was the morning of the day appointed for Richard’s departure. We had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all his packing early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until night, when he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead. Jarndyce and Jarndyce being again expected to come on that day, Richard proposed to me that we should go down to the Court and hear what passed. As it was his last day, and he was eager to go, and I had never been there, I gave my consent, and we walked down to Westminster, where the court was then sitting. We beguiled the way with arrangements concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me, and the letters that I was to write to him; and with a great many hopeful projects. My guardian knew where we were going, and therefore was not with us.

  When we came to the Court, there was the Lord Chancellor—the same whom I had seen in his private room in Lincoln’s Inn—sitting in great state and gravity, on the bench; with the mace and seals on a red table below him, and an immense flat nosegay, like a little garden, which scented the whole court. Below the table, again, was a long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs and gowns—some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody paying much attention to what he said. The Lord Chancellor leaned back in his very easy chair with his elbow on the cushioned arm, and his forehead resting on his hand; some of those who were present, dozed; some read the newspapers; some walked about, or whispered in groups: all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a hurry, very unconcerned, and extremely comfortable.

  To see everything going on so smoothly, and to think of the roughness of the suitors’ lives and deaths; to see all that full dress and ceremony, and to think of the waste, and want, and beggared misery it represented; to consider that, while the sickness of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts, this polite show went calmly on from day to day, and year to year, in such good order and composure; to behold the Lord Chancellor, and the whole array of practitioners under him, looking at one another and at the spectators, as if nobody had ever heard that all over England the name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest: was held in universal horror, contempt, and indignation; was known for something so flagrant and bad, that little short of a miracle could bring any good out of it to any one: this was so curious and self-contradictory to me, who had no experience of it, that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend it. I sat where Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me; but there seemed to be no reality in the whole scene, except poor little Miss Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench, and nodding at it.

  Miss Flite soon espied us, and came to where we sat. She gave me a gracious welcome to her domain, and indicated, with much gratification and pride, its principal attractions. Mr. Kenge also came to speak to us, and did the honours of the place in much the same way; with the bland modesty of a proprietor. It was not a very good day for a visit, he said; he would have preferred the first day of term; but it was imposing, it was imposing.

  When we had been there half an hour or so, the case in progress—if I may use a phrase so ridiculous in such a connexion—seemed to die out of its own vapidity, without coming, or being by anybody expected to come, to any result. The Lord Chancellor then threw down a bundle of papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, and somebody said, “JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE.” Upon this there was a buzz, and a laugh, and a general withdrawal of the bystanders, and a bringing in of great heaps, and piles and bags and bags-full of papers.

  I think it came on “for further directions,”—about some bill of costs, to the best of my understanding, which was confused enough. But I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs, who said they were “in it”; and none of them appeared to understand it much better than I. They chatted about it with the Lord Chancellor, and contradicted and explained among themselves, and some of them said it was this way, and some of them said it was that way, and some of them jocosely proposed to read huge volumes of affidavits, and there was more buzzing and laughing, and everybody concerned was in a state of idle entertainment, and nothing could be made of it by anybody. After an hour or so of this, and a good many speeches being begun and cut short, it was “referred back for the present,” as Mr. Kenge said, and the papers were bundled up again, before the clerks had finished bringing them in.

  I glanced at Richard, on the termination of these hopeless proceedings, and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome young face. “It can’t last for ever, Dame Durden. Better luck next time!” was all he said.

  I had seen Mr. Guppy bringing in papers, and arranging them for Mr. Kenge; and he had seen me and made me a forlorn bow, which rendered me desirous to get out of the Court. Richard had given me his arm, and was taking me away, when Mr. Guppy came up.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Carstone,” said he in a whisper, “and
Miss Summerson’s also; but there’s a lady here, a friend of mine, who knows her, and wishes to have the pleasure of shaking hands.” As he spoke, I saw before me, as if she had started into bodily shape from my remembrance, Mrs. Rachael of my godmother’s house.

  “How do you do, Esther?” said she. “Do you recollect me?”

  I gave her my hand, and told her yes, and that she was very little altered.

  “I wonder you remember those times, Esther,” she returned with her old asperity. “They are changed now. Well! I am glad to see you, and glad you are not too proud to know me.” But, indeed she seemed disappointed that I was not.

  “Proud, Mrs. Rachael!” I remonstrated.

  “I am married, Esther,” she returned, coldly correcting me, “and am Mrs. Chadband. Well! I wish you good day, and I hope you’ll do well.”

  Mr. Guppy, who had been attentive to this short dialogue, heaved a sigh in my ear, and elbowed his own and Mrs. Rachael’s way through the confused little crowd of people coming in and going out, which we were in the midst of, and which the change in the business brought together. Richard and I were making our way through it, and I was yet in the first chill of the late unexpected recognition, when I saw, coming towards us, but not seeing us, no less a person than Mr. George. He made nothing of the people about him as he tramped on, staring over their heads into the body of the Court.

  “George!” said Richard, as I called his attention to him.

  “You are well met, sir,” he returned. “And you, miss. Could you point a person out for me, I want? I don’t understand these places.”

  Turning as he spoke, and making an easy way for us, he stopped when we were out of the press, in a corner behind a great red curtain.

  “There’s a little cracked old woman,” he began, “that—”

  I put up my finger, for Miss Flite was close by me; having kept beside me all the time, and having called the attention of several of her legal acquaintance to me (as I had overheard to my confusion), by whispering in their ears, “Hush! Fitz-Jarndyce on my left!”