thing happened. Krook had drunk so much gin in his life that he had
become perfectly soaked with alcohol, so that he was just like a big
spongeful of it. Now, it is a curious fact that when a great mass of
inflammable material is heaped together, sometimes it will suddenly
burst into flame and burn up all in a minute, without anything or
anybody setting fire to it. This is just what happened to Krook. As he
stood in the middle of the dirty shop, without any warning, all in a
twinkling, he blazed up and burned, clothes and all, and in less time
than it takes to tell it, there was nothing left but a little pile of
ashes, a burnt mark in the floor and a sticky smoke that stuck to the
window-panes and hung in the air like soot. And this was all the
neighbors found when they came to search for him.
This was the end of Krook, and the rag-and-bottle shop was taken
possession of by Grandfather Smallweed, a hideous, crippled
money-lender, who had been his brother-in-law, and who at once went to
work ransacking all the papers he could find on the premises.
Grandfather Smallweed was a thin, toothless, wheezy, green-eyed old
miser, who was so nearly dead from age and asthma that he had to be
wheeled about by his granddaughter Judy.
He had a wife who was out of her mind. Everything said in her hearing
she connected with the idea of money. If one said, for example, "It's
twenty minutes past noon," Mrs. Smallweed would at once begin to gabble:
"Twenty pence! Twenty pounds! Twenty thousand millions of bank-notes
locked up in a black box!" and she would not stop till her husband threw
a cushion at her (which he kept beside him for that very purpose) and
knocked her mouth shut.
Grandfather Smallweed soon discovered the bundle of letters hidden back
of the shelf where Lady Jane, Krook's big cat, slept.
The name they bore, "Captain Hawdon," was familiar enough to the
money-lender. Long ago, when Hawdon was living a dissipated life in
London, he had borrowed money from Grandfather Smallweed, and this money
was still unpaid when he had disappeared. It was said that he had fallen
overboard from a vessel and had been drowned.
To think now that the captain had been living as a copyist all these
years in London, free from arrest for the debt, filled the wizened soul
of the old man with rage. He was ready enough to talk when Mr.
Tulkinghorn questioned him, and finally sold him the bundle of letters.
The lawyer saw that they were in Lady Dedlock's penmanship; it remained
to prove that the dead Nemo had really been Captain Hawdon.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, of course, had many specimens of the copyist's hand,
and after much search he found a man who had once been a fellow soldier
of the captain's. He was called "Mr. George," and kept a
shooting-gallery. Mr. George had among his papers a letter once written
him by Captain Hawdon, and not knowing the purpose for which it was to
be used, loaned it to the lawyer. The handwriting was the same! And thus
Mr. Tulkinghorn knew that the copyist had really been Captain Hawdon and
that the letters in the bundle had once been written to him by the woman
who was now the haughty Lady Dedlock.
It was a strange, sad story that the letters disclosed, as Mr.
Tulkinghorn, gloating over his success, read them, line by line. The man
who had fallen so low as to drag out a wretched existence by copying law
papers--whom, until she saw the handwriting in the lawyer's hands, she
had believed to be dead--was a man Lady Dedlock had once loved.
Many years before, when a young woman, she had run away from home with
him. A little child was born to them whom she named Esther. When she and
Hawdon had separated, her sister, to hide from the world the knowledge
of the elopement, had told her the baby Esther was dead, had taken the
child to another part of the country, given her the name of Summerson,
and, calling herself her godmother instead of her aunt, brought her up
in ignorance of the truth. Years had gone by and Captain Hawdon was
reported drowned. At length the little Esther's mother had met and
married Sir Leicester Dedlock, and in his love and protection had
thought her dark past buried from view for ever.
All this the pitiless lawyer read in the letters, and knew that Lady
Dedlock's happiness was now in his hands. And as he thought how, with
this knowledge, he could torture her with the fear of discovery, his
face took on the look of a cat's when it plays with a mouse it has
caught.
Meanwhile Lady Dedlock had suffered much. The knowledge that Hawdon had
not been drowned as she had supposed, had come to her like a
thunderclap. And the news of his death, following so soon after this
discovery, had unnerved her. She felt Mr. Tulkinghorn's suspicious eyes
watching her always and began to tremble in dread of what he might know.
In the midst of these fears, she accidentally discovered one day that
the baby name of Esther Summerson of Bleak House had been, not
Summerson, but Hawdon.
This made Lady Dedlock guess the whole truth--that Esther was in reality
her own daughter. As soon as she was alone, she threw herself on her
knees in the empty room with sobs, crying:
"Oh, my child! My child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my
cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had
renounced me and my name! Oh, my child! My child!"
III
LITTLE JOE PLAYS A PART
While these events, which so closely concerned Esther, were occurring in
London, life at Bleak House went quietly on. Ada and Esther had become
bosom friends, and both loved and respected Mr. Jarndyce above every
one. Harold Skimpole, as charming and careless as ever, and as willing
as ever that some one else should pay his debts for him, was often
there, and whenever they went to the city they saw Miss Flite and Mrs.
Jellyby, the latter still busily sending letters about the growing of
coffee and the education of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.
Esther grew especially to like Caddy, the slipshod daughter to whom Mrs.
Jellyby dictated her letters. The poor girl had much good in her, and
Esther encouraged and helped her all she could. Caddy finally fell in
love with Prince Turveydrop, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young man whose
father kept a dancing school.
Old Mr. Turveydrop, his father, was a fat man with a false complexion,
false teeth, false whiskers, a wig and a padded chest. He always carried
a cane, eye-glass and snuff-box and was so tightly buttoned up that when
he bowed you could almost see creases come into the whites of his eyes.
He thought himself a model of politeness and stood about to show off his
clothes while he made his son, Prince, do all the teaching.
Caddy was so tired of hearing about Africa that at last she married
Prince and moved into the Turveydrop dancing school, and Mrs. Jellyby
had to hire a boy to help her with her great plans for the education of
the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.
Once Esther and Ada went with Mr. Jarndyce to visit Mr. Boythorn--the
man with the tremendous laugh and the pet canary--at his country house
where he lived in one perpetual quarrel with his neighbor, Sir Leicester
Dedlock. Esther had often heard of the beauty of Lady Dedlock, and one
Sunday in the village church she saw her. There was something strangely
familiar in her look that reminded Esther of her godmother. An odd
sensation came over her then and she felt her heart beat quickly. But
this was before Lady Dedlock had guessed the truth, and Esther and she
did not meet.
Richard Carstone had soon begun to be a source of great anxiety to all
at Bleak House. It was plainly to be seen that he loved Ada dearly, and
that she loved him as well, but to Mr. Jarndyce's regret he had begun to
think and dream of the famous chancery suit and of the fortune that
would be his when it ended. Mr. Jarndyce, from his own bitter
experience, hated the Chancery Court and everything connected with it,
and saw with grief that Richard was growing to be a ne'er-do-well, who
found it easier to trust in the future than to labor in the present.
In spite of all advice Richard went from bad to worse. He began the
study of medicine, soon changed this for law, and lastly decided to
enter the army. He was naturally a spendthrift, and as long as his money
lasted Harold Skimpole found him a very fine friend and helped him spend
it.
Skimpole also introduced to him a knavish lawyer named Vholes, who made
him believe the great chancery suit must soon end in his favor, and who
(when Richard had put the case in his hands) proceeded to rob him of all
he had. He poisoned his mind, too, against Mr. Jarndyce, so that Richard
began to think his truest friend deceitful.
Ada saw this with pain, but she loved Richard above all else, and the
more so when she saw him so wretched and deceived; and at last, without
telling either Mr. Jarndyce or Esther what she was going to do, she
went to Richard one day and married him, so that, as her husband, he
could take the little fortune she possessed to pay Vholes to go on with
the chancery suit.
A great misfortune befell Esther about this time--a misfortune that came
to her, strangely enough, through little Joe, the crossing sweeper.
Half-starved, ragged and homeless all his life, Joe had never known
kindness save that given to him by the poor copyist who had lived above
Krook's rag-and-bottle shop. He lived (if having a corner to sleep in
can be called living) in a filthy alley called "Tom-all-Alone's." It
seemed to him that every one he met told him to "move on." The
policeman, the shopkeepers at whose doors he stopped for warmth, all
told him to "move on," till the wretched lad wondered if there was any
spot in London where he could rest undisturbed.
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
circumstances 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.
But the suit stopped of its own accord, for it was found now that there
was no longer any fortune left to go to law about or to be willed to
anybody. All the money had been eaten up by the costs.
After all the years of hope and strain, this disappointment was too much
for Richard, and he died that night, at the very hour when poor crazed
little Miss Flite (as she had said she would do when the famous suit
ended) gave all her caged birds their liberty.
The time came at length, after the widowed Ada and her baby boy had come
to make their home with Mr. Jarndyce, when Esther felt that she should
fulfil her promise and become the mistress of Bleak House. So she told
her guardian she was ready to marry him when he wished. He appointed a
day, and she began to prepare her wedding-clothes.
But Mr. Jarndyce, true-hearted and generous as he had always been, had
an idea very different from this in his mind. He had found, on Allan
Woodcourt's return from his voyage, that the young surgeon still loved
Esther. His keen eye had seen that she loved him in return, and he well
knew that if she married him, Jarndyce, it would be because of her
promise and because her grateful heart could not find it possible to
refuse him. So, wishing most of all her happiness, he determined to give
up his own love for her sake.
He bought a house in the town in which Woodcourt had decided to practise
medicine, remodeled it and named it "Bleak House," after his own. When
it was finished in the way he knew Esther liked best, he took her to see
it, telling her it was to be a present from him to the surgeon to repay
him for his kindness to little Joe.
Then, when she had seen it all, he told her that he had guessed her love
for Woodcourt, and that, though she married the surgeon and not himself,
she would still be carrying out her promise and would still become the
mistress of "Bleak House."
When she lifted her tearful face from his shoulder she saw that
Woodcourt was standing near them.
"This is 'Bleak House,'" said Jarndyce. "This day I give this house its
little mistress, and, before God, it is the brightest day of my life!"
HARD TIMES
Published 1854
_Scene_: Coketown (an English factory town) and the Country.
_Time_: About 1850
CHARACTERS
Mr. Gradgrind A believer in "facts"
Mrs. Gradgrind His wife
Louisa Their daughter
Tom Their son
Josiah Bounderby A pompous mill owner and banker
Later, Louisa's husband
"Mrs. Pegler" His mother
Mrs. Sparsit His housekeeper
Mr. M'Choakumchild A schoolmaster
Sleary The proprietor of a circus
"Signor" Jupe The clown
Cecelia Jupe His daughter. Known as "Sissy"
Stephen Blackpool }
} Mill workers
Rachel }
James Harthouse A man of the world
"Merrylegs" Signor Jupe's performing dog
HARD TIMES
I
MR. GRADGRIND AND HIS "SYSTEM"
In a cheerless house called Stone Lodge, in Coketown, a factory town in
England, where great weaving mills made the sky a blur of soot and
smoke, lived a man named Gradgrind. He was an obstinate, stubborn man,
with a square wall of a forehead and a wide, thin, set mouth. His head
was bald and shining, covered with knobs like the crust of a plum pie,
and skirted with bristling hair. He had grown rich in the hardware
business, and was a school director of the town.
He believed in nothing but "facts." Everything in the world to him was
good only to weigh and measure, and wherever he went one would have
thought he carried in his pocket a rule and scales and the
multiplication table. He seemed a kind of human cannon loaded to the
muzzle with facts.
"Now, what I want is facts!" he used to say to Mr. M'Choakumchild, the
schoolmaster. "Teach boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are
wanted in life. Nothing else is of any service to anybody. Stick to
facts, sir."
He had several children whom he had brought up according to this system
of his, and they led wretched lives. No little Gradgrind child had ever
seen a face in the moon, or learned _Mother Goose_ or listened to fairy
stories, or read _The Arabian Nights_. They all hated Coketown, always
rattling and throbbing with machinery; they hated its houses all built
of brick as red as an Indian's face, and its black canal and river
purple with dyes. And most of all they hated facts.
Louisa, the eldest daughter, looked jaded, for her imagination was quite
starved under their teachings. Tom, her younger brother, was defiant and
sullen. "I wish," he used to say, "that I could collect all the facts
and all the figures in the world, and all the people who found them out,
and I wish I could put a thousand pounds of gunpowder under them and
blow them all up together!"