Richard left us on the very next evening to begin his new career, and
committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great trust in
me. It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, more
nearly, to remember (having what I have to tell) how they both
thought of me, even at that engrossing time. I was a part of all
their plans, for the present and the future. I was to write Richard
once a week, making my faithful report of Ada, who was to write to
him every alternate day. I was to be informed, under his own hand, of
all his labours and successes; I was to observe how resolute and
persevering he would be; I was to be Ada's bridesmaid when they were
married; I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all the
keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever and a day.

"And if the suit SHOULD make us rich, Esther--which it may, you
know!" said Richard to crown all.

A shade crossed Ada's face.

"My dearest Ada," asked Richard, "why not?"

"It had better declare us poor at once," said Ada.

"Oh! I don't know about that," returned Richard, "but at all events,
it won't declare anything at once. It hasn't declared anything in
heaven knows how many years."

"Too true," said Ada.

"Yes, but," urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather
than her words, "the longer it goes on, dear cousin, the nearer it
must be to a settlement one way or other. Now, is not that
reasonable?"

"You know best, Richard. But I am afraid if we trust to it, it will
make us unhappy."

"But, my Ada, we are not going to trust to it!" cried Richard gaily.
"We know it better than to trust to it. We only say that if it SHOULD
make us rich, we have no constitutional objection to being rich. The
court is, by solemn settlement of law, our grim old guardian, and we
are to suppose that what it gives us (when it gives us anything) is
our right. It is not necessary to quarrel with our right."

"No," said Ada, "but it may be better to forget all about it."

"Well, well," cried Richard, "then we will forget all about it! We
consign the whole thing to oblivion. Dame Durden puts on her
approving face, and it's done!"

"Dame Durden's approving face," said I, looking out of the box in
which I was packing his books, "was not very visible when you called
it by that name; but it does approve, and she thinks you can't do
better."

So, Richard said there was an end of it, and immediately began, on no
other foundation, to build as many castles in the air as would man
the Great Wall of China. He went away in high spirits. Ada and I,
prepared to miss him very much, commenced our quieter career.

On our arrival in London, we had called with Mr. Jarndyce at Mrs.
Jellyby's but had not been so fortunate as to find her at home. It
appeared that she had gone somewhere to a tea-drinking and had taken
Miss Jellyby with her. Besides the tea-drinking, there was to be some
considerable speech-making and letter-writing on the general merits
of the cultivation of coffee, conjointly with natives, at the
Settlement of Borrioboola-Gha. All this involved, no doubt,
sufficient active exercise of pen and ink to make her daughter's part
in the proceedings anything but a holiday.

It being now beyond the time appointed for Mrs. Jellyby's return, we
called again. She was in town, but not at home, having gone to Mile
End directly after breakfast on some Borrioboolan business, arising
out of a society called the East London Branch Aid Ramification. As I
had not seen Peepy on the occasion of our last call (when he was not
to be found anywhere, and when the cook rather thought he must have
strolled away with the dustman's cart), I now inquired for him again.
The oyster shells he had been building a house with were still in the
passage, but he was nowhere discoverable, and the cook supposed that
he had "gone after the sheep." When we repeated, with some surprise,
"The sheep?" she said, Oh, yes, on market days he sometimes followed
them quite out of town and came back in such a state as never was!

I was sitting at the window with my guardian on the following
morning, and Ada was busy writing--of course to Richard--when Miss
Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical Peepy, whom
she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wiping the dirt
into corners of his face and hands and making his hair very wet and
then violently frizzling it with her fingers. Everything the dear
child wore was either too large for him or too small. Among his other
contradictory decorations he had the hat of a bishop and the little
gloves of a baby. His boots were, on a small scale, the boots of a
ploughman, while his legs, so crossed and recrossed with scratches
that they looked like maps, were bare below a very short pair of
plaid drawers finished off with two frills of perfectly different
patterns. The deficient buttons on his plaid frock had evidently been
supplied from one of Mr. Jellyby's coats, they were so extremely
brazen and so much too large. Most extraordinary specimens of
needlework appeared on several parts of his dress, where it had been
hastily mended, and I recognized the same hand on Miss Jellyby's. She
was, however, unaccountably improved in her appearance and looked
very pretty. She was conscious of poor little Peepy being but a
failure after all her trouble, and she showed it as she came in by
the way in which she glanced first at him and then at us.

"Oh, dear me!" said my guardian. "Due east!"

Ada and I gave her a cordial welcome and presented her to Mr.
Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat down, "Ma's compliments, and
she hopes you'll excuse her, because she's correcting proofs of the
plan. She's going to put out five thousand new circulars, and she
knows you'll be interested to hear that. I have brought one of them
with me. Ma's compliments." With which she presented it sulkily
enough.

"Thank you," said my guardian. "I am much obliged to Mrs. Jellyby.
Oh, dear me! This is a very trying wind!"

We were busy with Peepy, taking off his clerical hat, asking him if
he remembered us, and so on. Peepy retired behind his elbow at first,
but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to take him
on my lap, where he sat munching quietly. Mr. Jarndyce then
withdrawing into the temporary growlery, Miss Jellyby opened a
conversation with her usual abruptness.

"We are going on just as bad as ever in Thavies Inn," said she. "I
have no peace of my life. Talk of Africa! I couldn't be worse off if
I was a what's-his-name--man and a brother!"

I tried to say something soothing.

"Oh, it's of no use, Miss Summerson," exclaimed Miss Jellyby, "though
I thank you for the kind intention all the same. I know how I am
used, and I am not to be talked over. YOU wouldn't be talked over if
you were used so. Peepy, go and play at Wild Beasts under the piano!"

"I shan't!" said Peepy.

"Very well, you ungrateful, naughty, hard-hearted boy!" returned Miss
Jellyby with tears in her eyes. "I'll never take pains to dress you
any more."

"Yes, I will go, Caddy!" cried Peepy, who was really a good child and
who was so moved by his sister's vexation that he went at once.

"It seems a little thing to cry about," said poor Miss Jellyby
apologetically, "but I am quite worn out. I was directing the new
circulars till two this morning. I detest the whole thing so that
that alone makes my head ache till I can't see out of my eyes. And
look at that poor unfortunate child! Was there ever such a fright as
he is!"

Peepy, happily unconscious of the defects in his appearance, sat on
the carpet behind one of the legs of the piano, looking calmly out of
his den at us while he ate his cake.

"I have sent him to the other end of the room," observed Miss
Jellyby, drawing her chair nearer ours, "because I don't want him to
hear the conversation. Those little things are so sharp! I was going
to say, we really are going on worse than ever. Pa will be a bankrupt
before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied. There'll he nobody
but Ma to thank for it."

We said we hoped Mr. Jellyby's affairs were not in so bad a state as
that.

"It's of no use hoping, though it's very kind of you," returned Miss
Jellyby, shaking her head. "Pa told me only yesterday morning (and
dreadfully unhappy he is) that he couldn't weather the storm. I
should be surprised if he could. When all our tradesmen send into our
house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they like with
it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don't
care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather
the storm. I declare if I was Pa, I'd run away."

"My dear!" said I, smiling. "Your papa, no doubt, considers his
family."

"Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss
Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is
nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion,
and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end,
is like one great washing-day--only nothing's washed!"

Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and wiped her eyes.

"I am sure I pity Pa to that degree," she said, "and am so angry with
Ma that I can't find words to express myself! However, I am not going
to bear it, I am determined. I won't be a slave all my life, and I
won't submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale. A pretty thing, indeed,
to marry a philanthropist. As if I hadn't had enough of THAT!" said
poor Miss Jellyby.

I must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs.
Jellyby myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing
how much of bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said.

"If it wasn't that we had been intimate when you stopped at our
house," pursued Miss Jellyby, "I should have been ashamed to come
here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to you two. But as
it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not likely to
see you again the next time you come to town."

She said this with such great significance that Ada and I glanced at
one another, foreseeing something more.

"No!" said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Not at all likely! I know
I may trust you two. I am sure you won't betray me. I am engaged."

"Without their knowledge at home?" said I.

"Why, good gracious me, Miss Summerson," she returned, justifying
herself in a fretful but not angry manner, "how can it be otherwise?
You know what Ma is--and I needn't make poor Pa more miserable by
telling HIM."

"But would it not be adding to his unhappiness to marry without his
knowledge or consent, my dear?" said I.

"No," said Miss Jellyby, softening. "I hope not. I should try to make
him happy and comfortable when he came to see me, and Peepy and the
others should take it in turns to come and stay with me, and they
should have some care taken of them then."

There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy. She softened more
and more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted little
home-picture she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his cave under
the piano, was touched, and turned himself over on his back with loud
lamentations. It was not until I had brought him to kiss his sister,
and had restored him to his place on my lap, and had shown him that
Caddy was laughing (she laughed expressly for the purpose), that we
could recall his peace of mind; even then it was for some time
conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin and smoothing our
faces all over with his hand. At last, as his spirits were not equal
to the piano, we put him on a chair to look out of window; and Miss
Jellyby, holding him by one leg, resumed her confidence.

"It began in your coming to our house," she said.

We naturally asked how.

"I felt I was so awkward," she replied, "that I made up my mind to be
improved in that respect at all events and to learn to dance. I told
Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I must be taught to dance. Ma looked
at me in that provoking way of hers as if I wasn't in sight, but I
was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I went to Mr.
Turveydrop's Academy in Newman Street."

"And was it there, my dear--" I began.

"Yes, it was there," said Caddy, "and I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop.
There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son. My Mr. Turveydrop is
the son, of course. I only wish I had been better brought up and was
likely to make him a better wife, for I am very fond of him."

"I am sorry to hear this," said I, "I must confess."

"I don't know why you should be sorry," she retorted a little
anxiously, "but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or no, and he
is very fond of me. It's a secret as yet, even on his side, because
old Mr. Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it might break
his heart or give him some other shock if he was told of it abruptly.
Old Mr. Turveydrop is a very gentlemanly man indeed--very
gentlemanly."

"Does his wife know of it?" asked Ada.

"Old Mr. Turveydrop's wife, Miss Clare?" returned Miss Jellyby,
opening her eyes. "There's no such person. He is a widower."

We were here interrupted by Peepy, whose leg had undergone so much on
account of his sister's unconsciously jerking it like a bell-rope
whenever she was emphatic that the afflicted child now bemoaned his
sufferings with a very low-spirited noise. As he appealed to me for
compassion, and as I was only a listener, I undertook to hold him.
Miss Jellyby proceeded, after begging Peepy's pardon with a kiss and
assuring him that she hadn't meant to do it.

"That's the state of the case," said Caddy. "If I ever blame myself,
I still think it's Ma's fault. We are to be married whenever we can,
and then I shall go to Pa at the office and write to Ma. It won't
much agitate Ma; I am only pen and ink to HER. One great comfort is,"
said Caddy with a sob, "that I shall never hear of Africa after I am
married. Young Mr. Turveydrop hates it for my sake, and if old Mr.
Turveydrop knows there is such a place, it's as much as he does."

"It was he who was very gentlemanly, I think!" said I.

"Very gentlemanly indeed," said Caddy. "He is celebrated almost
everywhere for his deportment."

"Does he teach?" asked Ada.

"No, he don't teach anything in particular," replied Caddy. "But his
deportment is beautiful."

Caddy went on to say with considerable hesitation and reluctance that
there was one thing more she wished us to know, and felt we ought to
know, and which she hoped would not offend us. It was that she had
improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little crazy old lady,
and that she frequently went there early in the morning and met her
lover for a few minutes before breakfast--only for a few minutes. "I
go there at other times," said Caddy, "but Prince does not come then.
Young Mr. Turveydrop's name is Prince; I wish it wasn't, because it
sounds like a dog, but of course he didn't christen himself. Old Mr.
Turveydrop had him christened Prince in remembrance of the Prince
Regent. Old Mr. Turveydrop adored the Prince Regent on account of his
deportment. I hope you won't think the worse of me for having made
these little appointments at Miss Flite's, where I first went with
you, because I like the poor thing for her own sake and I believe she
likes me. If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop, I am sure you would
think well of him--at least, I am sure you couldn't possibly think
any ill of him. I am going there now for my lesson. I couldn't ask
you to go with me, Miss Summerson; but if you would," said Caddy, who
had said all this earnestly and tremblingly, "I should be very
glad--very glad."

It happened that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss
Flite's that day. We had told him of our former visit, and our
account had interested him; but something had always happened to
prevent our going there again. As I trusted that I might have
sufficient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking any very
rash step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so willing to
place in me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and Peepy should go
to the academy and afterwards meet my guardian and Ada at Miss
Flite's, whose name I now learnt for the first time. This was on
condition that Miss Jellyby and Peepy should come back with us to
dinner. The last article of the agreement being joyfully acceded to
by both, we smartened Peepy up a little with the assistance of a few
pins, some soap and water, and a hair-brush, and went out, bending
our steps towards Newman Street, which was very near.

I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at the
corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows. In the
same house there were also established, as I gathered from the plates
on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there was, certainly,
no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist. On the plate
which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I
read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up
by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in
cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the
daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent,
last night, for a concert.

We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once, when it was
anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's business
to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great room, which
was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a skylight.
It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms
along the walls, and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with
painted lyres and little cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed
to be shedding their old-fashioned drops as other branches might shed
autumn leaves. Several young lady pupils, ranging from thirteen or
fourteen years of age to two or three and twenty, were assembled; and
I was looking among them for their instructor when Caddy, pinching my
arm, repeated the ceremony of introduction. "Miss Summerson, Mr.
Prince Turveydrop!"

I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance with
flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends all round
his head. He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at school a
kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same hand. His
little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a
little innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed to me in an
amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me, that I received
the impression that he was like his mother and that his mother had
not been much considered or well used.

"I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low
to me. "I began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past the
usual time, that Miss Jellyby was not coming."

"I beg you will have the goodness to attribute that to me, who have
detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I.

"Oh, dear!" said he.

"And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause of any more
delay."

With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who, being well
used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an old lady
of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the class and
who was very indignant with Peepy's boots. Prince Turveydrop then
tinkled the strings of his kit with his fingers, and the young ladies
stood up to dance. Just then there appeared from a side-door old Mr.
Turveydrop, in the full lustre of his deportment.

He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth,
false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded
breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon
to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and
strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a
neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and
his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though
he must inevitably double up if it were cast loose. He had under his
arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown
to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves with which he
flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered,
round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane,
he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had
wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not
like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the
world but a model of deportment.

"Father! A visitor. Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson."

"Distinguished," said Mr. Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's presence."
As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases
come into the whites of his eyes.

"My father," said the son, aside, to me with quite an affecting
belief in him, "is a celebrated character. My father is greatly
admired."

"Go on, Prince! Go on!" said Mr. Turveydrop, standing with his back
to the fire and waving his gloves condescendingly. "Go on, my son!"

At this command, or by this gracious permission, the lesson went on.
Prince Turveydrop sometimes played the kit, dancing; sometimes played
the piano, standing; sometimes hummed the tune with what little
breath he could spare, while he set a pupil right; always
conscientiously moved with the least proficient through every step
and every part of the figure; and never rested for an instant. His
distinguished father did nothing whatever but stand before the fire,
a model of deportment.

"And he never does anything else," said the old lady of the
censorious countenance. "Yet would you believe that it's HIS name on
the door-plate?"

"His son's name is the same, you know," said I.

"He wouldn't let his son have any name if he could take it from him,"
returned the old lady. "Look at the son's dress!" It certainly was
plain--threadbare--almost shabby. "Yet the father must be garnished
and tricked out," said the old lady, "because of his deportment. I'd
deport him! Transport him would be better!"

I felt curious to know more concerning this person. I asked, "Does he
give lessons in deportment now?"

"Now!" returned the old lady shortly. "Never did."

After a moment's consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing had
been his accomplishment.

"I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am," said the old lady.

I looked surprised and inquisitive. The old lady, becoming more and
more incensed against the master of deportment as she dwelt upon the
subject, gave me some particulars of his career, with strong
assurances that they were mildly stated.

He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable
connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport
himself), and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, suffered
her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those expenses which
were indispensable to his position. At once to exhibit his deportment
to the best models and to keep the best models constantly before
himself, he had found it necessary to frequent all public places of
fashionable and lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere
at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best
clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little
dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and
laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the
mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing
selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the
last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving
terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable
claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and
deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the
deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith,
and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a
day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary
pinnacle.

"The airs the fellow gives himself!" said my informant, shaking her
head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew on
his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was
rendering. "He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy! And he is
so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that you might
suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!" said the old lady,
apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. "I could bite you!"

I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with
feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the
father and son before me. What I might have thought of them without
the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the old
lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of
things in the whole that carried conviction with it.

My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so
hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when
the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.

He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a
distinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it necessary
to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in any
case, but merely told him where I did reside.

"A lady so graceful and accomplished," he said, kissing his
right glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils,
"will look leniently on the deficiencies here. We do our best to
polish--polish--polish!"

He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form, I
thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the
sofa. And really he did look very like it.

"To polish--polish--polish!" he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and
gently fluttering his fingers. "But we are not, if I may say so to
one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art--" with the
high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make
without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not
what we used to be in point of deportment."

"Are we not, sir?" said I.

"We have degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he could
do to a very limited extent in his cravat. "A levelling age is not
favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with
some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been
called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal
Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my
removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that
fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don't I know
him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are little
matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am--still repeated
occasionally among the upper classes."

"Indeed?" said I.

He replied with the high-shouldered bow. "Where what is left among us
of deportment," he added, "still lingers. England--alas, my
country!--has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day.
She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed
us but a race of weavers."

"One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated
here," said I.

"You are very good." He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again. "You
flatter me. But, no--no! I have never been able to imbue my poor boy
with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should disparage my
dear child, but he has--no deportment."

"He appears to be an excellent master," I observed.

"Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All that
can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can
impart. But there ARE things--" He took another pinch of snuff and
made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for instance."

I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's lover,
now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than
ever.

"My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat.

"Your son is indefatigable," said I.

"It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to hear you say so. In some
respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She was a
devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr. Turveydrop
with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!"

I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her
bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was
a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the
unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't
know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a
dozen words.

"My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, "do you know the
hour?"

"No, father." The son had no watch. The father had a handsome gold
one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to mankind.

"My son," said he, "it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at
Kensington at three."

"That's time enough for me, father," said Prince. "I can take a
morsel of dinner standing and be off."

"My dear boy," returned his father, "you must be very quick. You will
find the cold mutton on the table."

"Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?"

"Yes, my dear. I suppose," said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and
lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, "that I must show
myself, as usual, about town."

"You had better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son.

"My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at
the French house, in the Opera Colonnade."

"That's right. Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands.

"Good-bye, my son. Bless you!"

Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to do
his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, so
dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it were
an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe implicitly
in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking
leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the
secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish
character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put
his little kit in his pocket--and with it his desire to stay a little
while with Caddy--and went away good-humouredly to his cold mutton
and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less irate with
his father than the censorious old lady.

The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner,
I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the same style
he presently passed us on the other side of the street, on his way to
the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going to show himself
among the few other gentlemen left. For some moments, I was so lost
in reconsidering what I had heard and seen in Newman Street that I
was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to fix my attention on what
she said to me, especially when I began to inquire in my mind whether
there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the dancing
profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their
deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility
of so many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up
your mind to abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy." I
accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the way to
Lincoln's Inn.

Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that
it was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
anxious about his spelling and took less pains to make it clear, he
would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He
does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the
effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason, how
could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole
life in the dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag,
fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She
could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it
was far better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not
as if I was an accomplished girl who had any right to give herself
airs," said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to Ma!

"There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone,"
continued Caddy, "which I should not have liked to mention unless you
had seen Prince, Miss Summerson. You know what a house ours is. It's
of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be useful for
Prince's wife to know in OUR house. We live in such a state of muddle
that it's impossible, and I have only been more disheartened whenever
I have tried. So I get a little practice with--who do you think? Poor
Miss Flite! Early in the morning I help her to tidy her room and
clean her birds, and I make her cup of coffee for her (of course she
taught me), and I have learnt to make it so well that Prince says
it's the very best coffee he ever tasted, and would quite delight old
Mr. Turveydrop, who is very particular indeed about his coffee. I can
make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and
tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am
not clever at my needle, yet," said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on
Peepy's frock, "but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been
engaged to Prince and have been doing all this, I have felt
better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma. It rather put me
out at first this morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat
and pretty and to feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the
whole I hope I am better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to
Ma."

The poor girl, trying so hard, said it from her heart, and touched
mine. "Caddy, my love," I replied, "I begin to have a great affection
for you, and I hope we shall become friends."

"Oh, do you?" cried Caddy. "How happy that would make me!"

"My dear Caddy," said I, "let us be friends from this time, and let
us often have a chat about these matters and try to find the right
way through them." Caddy was overjoyed. I said everything I could in
my old-fashioned way to comfort and encourage her, and I would not
have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop that day for any smaller
consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-law.

By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood
open. There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room to
let on the second floor. It reminded Caddy to tell me as we proceeded
upstairs that there had been a sudden death there and an inquest and
that our little friend had been ill of the fright. The door and
window of the vacant room being open, we looked in. It was the room
with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly directed my
attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place it
was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of
mournfulness and even dread. "You look pale," said Caddy when we came
out, "and cold!" I felt as if the room had chilled me.

We had walked slowly while we were talking, and my guardian and Ada
were here before us. We found them in Miss Flite's garret. They were
looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman who was so good as to
attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion spoke with her
cheerfully by the fire.

"I have finished my professional visit," he said, coming forward.
"Miss Flite is much better and may appear in court (as her mind is
set upon it) to-morrow. She has been greatly missed there, I
understand."

Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and dropped a
general curtsy to us.

"Honoured, indeed," said she, "by another visit from the wards in
Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my
humble roof!" with a special curtsy. "Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear"--she
had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called her
by it--"a double welcome!"

"Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom we
had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself directly,
though he had put the question in a whisper.

"Oh, decidedly unwell! Oh, very unwell indeed," she said
confidentially. "Not pain, you know--trouble. Not bodily so much as
nervous, nervous! The truth is," in a subdued voice and trembling,
"we have had death here. There was poison in the house. I am very
susceptible to such horrid things. It frightened me. Only Mr.
Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr. Woodcourt!" with
great stateliness. "The wards in Jarndyce--Jarndyce of Bleak
House--Fitz-Jarndyce!"

"Miss Flite," said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he
were appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand
gently on her arm, "Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual
accuracy. She was alarmed by an occurrence in the house which might
have alarmed a stronger person, and was made ill by the distress and
agitation. She brought me here in the first hurry of the discovery,
though too late for me to be of any use to the unfortunate man. I
have compensated myself for that disappointment by coming here since
and being of some small use to her."

"The kindest physician in the college," whispered Miss Flite 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, looking at
her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. In other words,
quite well of course. Have you heard of her good fortune?"

"Most extraordinary!" said Miss Flite, smiling brightly. "You never
heard of such a thing, my dear! Every Saturday, Conversation Kenge or
Guppy (clerk to Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper of
shillings. Shillings. I assure you! Always the same number in the
paper. Always one for every day in the week. Now you know, really! So
well-timed, is it not? Ye-es! From whence do these papers come, you
say? That is the great question. Naturally. Shall I tell you what I
think? I think," said Miss Flite, drawing herself back with a very
shrewd look and shaking her right forefinger in a most significant
manner, "that the Lord Chancellor, aware of the length of time during
which the Great Seal has been open (for it has been open a long
time!), forwards them. Until the judgment I expect is given. Now
that's very creditable, you know. To confess in that way that he IS a
little slow for human life. So delicate! Attending court the other
day--I attend it regularly, with my documents--I taxed him with it,
and he almost confessed. That is, I smiled at him from my bench, and
HE smiled at me from his bench. But it's great good fortune, is it
not? And Fitz-Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great advantage.
Oh, I assure you to the greatest advantage!"

I congratulated her (as she addressed herself to me) upon this
fortunate addition to her income and wished her a long continuance of
it. I did not speculate upon the source from which it came or wonder
whose humanity was so considerate. My guardian stood before me,
contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond him.

"And what do you call these little fellows, ma'am?" said he in his
pleasant voice. "Have they any names?"

"I can answer for Miss Flite that they have," said I, "for she
promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?"

Ada remembered very well.

"Did I?" said Miss Flite. "Who's that at my door? What are you
listening at my door for, Krook?"

The old man of the house, pushing it open before him, appeared there
with his fur cap in his hand and his cat at his heels.

"I warn't listening, Miss Flite," he said, "I was going to give a rap
with my knuckles, only you're so quick!"

"Make your cat go down. Drive her away!" the old lady angrily
exclaimed.

"Bah, bah! There ain't no danger, gentlefolks," said Mr. Krook,
looking slowly and sharply from one to another until he had looked at
all of us; "she'd never offer at the birds when I was here unless I
told her to it."

"You will excuse my landlord," said the old lady with a dignified
air. "M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I have company?"

"Hi!" said the old man. "You know I am the Chancellor."

"Well?" returned Miss Flite. "What of that?"

"For the Chancellor," said the old man with a chuckle, "not to be
acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain't it, Miss Flite? Mightn't I
take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and Jarndyce
a'most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never
to my knowledge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go
there a mortal sight of times in the course of the year, taking one
day with another."

"I never go there," said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any
consideration). "I would sooner go--somewhere else."

"Would you though?" returned Krook, grinning. "You're bearing hard
upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though
perhaps it is but nat'ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir! What,
you're looking at my lodger's birds, Mr. Jarndyce?" The old man had
come by little and little into the room until he now touched my
guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his face with his
spectacled eyes. "It's one of her strange ways that she'll never tell
the names of these birds if she can help it, though she named 'em
all." This was in a whisper. "Shall I run 'em over, Flite?" he asked
aloud, winking at us and pointing at her as she turned away,
affecting to sweep the grate.

"If you like," she answered hurriedly.

The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us, went
through the list.

"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin,
Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags,
Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That's
the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by
my noble and learned brother."

"This is a bitter wind!" muttered my guardian.

"When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they're to be
let go free," said Krook, winking at us again. "And then," he added,
whispering and grinning, "if that ever was to happen--which it
won't--the birds that have never been caged would kill 'em."

"If ever the wind was in the east," said my guardian, pretending to
look out of the window for a weathercock, "I think it's there
to-day!"

We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not
Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature
in consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be.
It was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr.
Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have attended
him more closely. He proposed to show us his Court of Chancery and
all the strange medley it contained; during the whole of our
inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr. Jarndyce and
sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had
passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon
some secret subject which he could not make up his mind to approach.
I cannot imagine a countenance and manner more singularly expressive
of caution and indecision, and a perpetual impulse to do something he
could not resolve to venture on, than Mr. Krook's was that day. His
watchfulness of my guardian was incessant. He rarely removed his eyes
from his face. If he went on beside him, he observed him with the
slyness of an old white fox. If he went before, he looked back. When
we stood still, he got opposite to him, and drawing his hand across
and across his open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of
power, and turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until
they appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face.

At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house
and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was
certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on
the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old
stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were
pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands.

"What are you doing here?" asked my guardian.

"Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook.

"And how do you get on?"

"Slow. Bad," returned the old man impatiently. "It's hard at my time
of life."

"It would be easier to be taught by some one," said my guardian.

"Aye, but they might teach me wrong!" returned the old man with a
wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. "I don't know what I may
have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn't like to lose
anything by being learned wrong now."

"Wrong?" said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. "Who do you
suppose would teach you wrong?"

"I don't know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!" replied the old man,
turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. "I
don't suppose as anybody would, but I'd rather trust my own self than
another!"

These answers and his manner were strange enough to cause my guardian
to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt, as we all walked across Lincoln's Inn
together, whether Mr. Krook were really, as his lodger represented
him, deranged. The young surgeon replied, no, he had seen no reason
to think so. He was exceedingly distrustful, as ignorance usually
was, and he was always more or less under the influence of raw gin,
of which he drank great quantities and of which he and his back-shop,
as we might have observed, smelt strongly; but he did not think him
mad as yet.

On our way home, I so conciliated Peepy's affections by buying him a
windmill and two flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to take
off his hat and gloves and would sit nowhere at dinner but at my
side. Caddy sat upon the other side of me, next to Ada, to whom we
imparted the whole history of the engagement as soon as we got back.
We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy brightened
exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were all
very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney-coach,
with Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill.

I have forgotten to mention--at least I have not mentioned--that Mr.
Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr.
Badger's. Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or
that he came. Or that when they were all gone and I said to Ada,
"Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!" Ada
laughed and said--

But I don't think it matters what my darling said. She was always
merry.

While we were in London Mr. Jarndyce was constantly beset by the
crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen whose proceedings had so much
astonished us. Mr. Quale, who presented himself soon after our
arrival, was in all such excitements. He seemed to project those two
shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went on and to
brush his hair farther and farther back, until the very roots were
almost ready to fly out of his head in inappeasable philanthropy. All
objects were alike to him, but he was always particularly ready for
anything in the way of a testimonial to any one. His great power
seemed to be his power of indiscriminate admiration. He would sit for
any length of time, with the utmost enjoyment, bathing his temples in
the light of any order of luminary. Having first seen him perfectly
swallowed up in admiration of Mrs. Jellyby, I had supposed her to be
the absorbing object of his devotion. I soon discovered my mistake
and found him to be train-bearer and organ-blower to a whole
procession of people.

Mrs. Pardiggle came one day for a subscription to something, and with
her, Mr. Quale. Whatever Mrs. Pardiggle said, Mr. Quale repeated to
us; and just as he had drawn Mrs. Jellyby out, he drew Mrs. Pardiggle
out. Mrs. Pardiggle wrote a letter of introduction to my guardian in
behalf of her eloquent friend Mr. Gusher. With Mr. Gusher appeared
Mr. Quale again. Mr. Gusher, being a flabby gentleman with a moist
surface and eyes so much too small for his moon of a face that they
seemed to have been originally made for somebody else, was not at
first sight prepossessing; yet he was scarcely seated before Mr.
Quale asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, whether he was not a great
creature--which he certainly was, flabbily speaking, though Mr. Quale
meant in intellectual beauty--and whether we were not struck by his
massive configuration of brow. In short, we heard of a great many
missions of various sorts among this set of people, but nothing
respecting them was half so clear to us as that it was Mr. Quale's
mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else's mission and that it
was the most popular mission of all.

Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his
heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but
that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where
benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a
regular uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap
notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action,
servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one
another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help
the weak from failing rather than with a great deal of bluster and
self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down, he
plainly told us. When a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale by
Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and
when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a
meeting, including two charity schools of small boys and girls, who
were specially reminded of the widow's mite, and requested to come
forward with halfpence and be acceptable sacrifices, I think the wind
was in the east for three whole weeks.

I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again. It seemed
to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and carelessness
were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with such things, and
were the more readily believed in since to find one perfectly
undesigning and candid man among many opposites could not fail to
give him pleasure. I should be sorry to imply that Mr. Skimpole
divined this and was politic; I really never understood him well
enough to know. What he was to my guardian, he certainly was to the
rest of the world.

He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we
had seen nothing of him until now. He appeared one morning in his
usual agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever.

Well, he said, here he was! He had been bilious, but rich men were
often bilious, and therefore he had been persuading himself that he
was a man of property. So he was, in a certain point of view--in his
expansive intentions. He had been enriching his medical attendant in
the most lavish manner. He had always doubled, and sometimes
quadrupled, his fees. He had said to the doctor, "Now, my dear
doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that you
attend me for nothing. I am overwhelming you with money--in my
expansive intentions--if you only knew it!" And really (he said) he
meant it to that degree that he thought it much the same as doing it.
If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper to which mankind
attached so much importance to put in the doctor's hand, he would
have put them in the doctor's hand. Not having them, he substituted
the will for the deed. Very well! If he really meant it--if his will
were genuine and real, which it was--it appeared to him that it was
the same as coin, and cancelled the obligation.

"It may be, partly, because I know nothing of the value of money,"
said Mr. Skimpole, "but I often feel this. It seems so reasonable! My
butcher says to me he wants that little bill. It's a part of the
pleasant unconscious poetry of the man's nature that he always calls
it a 'little' bill--to make the payment appear easy to both of us. I
reply to the butcher, 'My good friend, if you knew it, you are paid.
You haven't had the trouble of coming to ask for the little bill. You
are paid. I mean it.'"

"But, suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "he had meant the meat in
the bill, instead of providing it?"

"My dear Jarndyce," he returned, "you surprise me. You take the
butcher's position. A butcher I once dealt with occupied that very
ground. Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen pence
a pound?' 'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound, my
honest friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question. 'I like
spring lamb!' This was so far convincing. 'Well, sir,' says he, 'I
wish I had meant the lamb as you mean the money!' 'My good fellow,'
said I, 'pray let us reason like intellectual beings. How could that
be? It was impossible. You HAD got the lamb, and I have NOT got the
money. You couldn't really mean the lamb without sending it in,
whereas I can, and do, really mean the money without paying it!' He
had not a word. There was an end of the subject."

"Did he take no legal proceedings?" inquired my guardian.

"Yes, he took legal proceedings," said Mr. Skimpole. "But in that he
was influenced by passion, not by reason. Passion reminds me of
Boythorn. He writes me that you and the ladies have promised him a
short visit at his bachelor-house in Lincolnshire."

"He is a great favourite with my girls," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and I
have promised for them."

"Nature forgot to shade him off, I think," observed Mr. Skimpole to
Ada and me. "A little too boisterous--like the sea. A little too
vehement--like a bull who has made up his mind to consider every
colour scarlet. But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!"

I should have been surprised if those two could have thought very
highly of one another, Mr. Boythorn attaching so much importance to
many things and Mr. Skimpole caring so little for anything. Besides
which, I had noticed Mr. Boythorn more than once on the point of
breaking out into some strong opinion when Mr. Skimpole was referred
to. Of course I merely joined Ada in saying that we had been greatly
pleased with him.

"He has invited me," said Mr. Skimpole; "and if a child may trust
himself in such hands--which the present child is encouraged to do,
with the united tenderness of two angels to guard him--I shall go. He
proposes to frank me down and back again. I suppose it will cost
money? Shillings perhaps? Or pounds? Or something of that sort? By
the by, Coavinses. You remember our friend Coavinses, Miss
Summerson?"

He asked me as the subject arose in his mind, in his graceful,
light-hearted manner and without the least embarrassment.

"Oh, yes!" said I.

"Coavinses has been arrested by the Great Bailiff," said Mr.
Skimpole. "He will never do violence to the sunshine any more."

It quite shocked me to hear it, for I had already recalled with
anything but a serious association the image of the man sitting on
the sofa that night wiping his head.

"His successor informed me of it yesterday," said Mr. Skimpole. "His
successor is in my house now--in possession, I think he calls it. He
came yesterday, on my blue-eyed daughter's birthday. I put it to him,
'This is unreasonable and inconvenient. If you had a blue-eyed
daughter you wouldn't like ME to come, uninvited, on HER birthday?'
But he stayed."

Mr. Skimpole laughed at the pleasant absurdity and lightly touched
the piano by which he was seated.

"And he told me," he said, playing little chords where I shall put
full stops, "The Coavinses had left. Three children. No mother. And
that Coavinses' profession. Being unpopular. The rising Coavinses.
Were at a considerable disadvantage."

Mr. Jarndyce got up, rubbing his head, and began to walk about. Mr.
Skimpole played the melody of one of Ada's favourite songs. Ada and I
both looked at Mr. Jarndyce, thinking that we knew what was passing
in his mind.

After walking and stopping, and several times leaving off rubbing his
head, and beginning again, my guardian put his hand upon the keys and
stopped Mr. Skimpole's playing. "I don't like this, Skimpole," he
said thoughtfully.

Mr. Skimpole, who had quite forgotten the subject, looked up
surprised.

"The man was necessary," pursued my guardian, walking backward and
forward in the very short space between the piano and the end of the
room and rubbing his hair up from the back of his head as if a high
east wind had blown it into that form. "If we make such men necessary
by our faults and follies, or by our want of worldly knowledge, or by
our misfortunes, we must not revenge ourselves upon them. There was
no harm in his trade. He maintained his children. One would like to
know more about this."

"Oh! Coavinses?" cried Mr. Skimpole, at length perceiving what he
meant. "Nothing easier. A walk to Coavinses' headquarters, and you
can know what you will."

Mr. Jarndyce nodded to us, who were only waiting for the signal.
"Come! We will walk that way, my dears. Why not that way as soon as
another!" We were quickly ready and went out. Mr. Skimpole went with
us and quite enjoyed the expedition. It was so new and so refreshing,
he said, for him to want Coavinses instead of Coavinses wanting him!

He took us, first, to Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, where there was
a house with barred windows, which he called Coavinses' Castle. On
our going into the entry and ringing a bell, a very hideous boy came
out of a sort of office and looked at us over a spiked wicket.

"Who did you want?" said the boy, fitting two of the spikes into his
chin.

"There was a follower, or an officer, or something, here," said Mr.
Jarndyce, "who is dead."

"Yes?" said the boy. "Well?"

"I want to know his name, if you please?"

"Name of Neckett," said the boy.

"And his address?"

"Bell Yard," said the boy. "Chandler's shop, left hand side, name of
Blinder."

"Was he--I don't know how to shape the question--" murmured my
guardian, "industrious?"

"Was Neckett?" said the boy. "Yes, wery much so. He was never tired
of watching. He'd set upon a post at a street corner eight or ten
hours at a stretch if he undertook to do it."

"He might have done worse," I heard my guardian soliloquize. "He
might have undertaken to do it and not done it. Thank you. That's all
I want."

We left the boy, with his head on one side and his arms on the gate,
fondling and sucking the spikes, and went back to Lincoln's Inn,
where Mr. Skimpole, who had not cared to remain nearer Coavinses,
awaited us. Then we all went to Bell Yard, a narrow alley at a very
short distance. We soon found the chandler's shop. In it was a
good-natured-looking old woman with a dropsy, or an asthma, or
perhaps both.

"Neckett's children?" said she in reply to my inquiry. "Yes, Surely,
miss. Three pair, if you please. Door right opposite the stairs." And
she handed me the key across the counter.

I glanced at the key and glanced at her, but she took it for granted
that I knew what to do with it. As it could only be intended for the
children's door, I came out without asking any more questions and led
the way up the dark stairs. We went as quietly as we could, but four
of us made some noise on the aged boards, and when we came to the
second story we found we had disturbed a man who was standing there
looking out of his room.

"Is it Gridley that's wanted?" he said, fixing his eyes on me with an
angry stare.

"No, sir," said I; "I am going higher up."

He looked at Ada, and at Mr. Jarndyce, and at Mr. Skimpole, fixing
the same angry stare on each in succession as they passed and
followed me. Mr. Jarndyce gave him good day. "Good day!" he said
abruptly and fiercely. He was a tall, sallow man with a careworn head
on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and prominent
eyes. He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable manner which,
associated with his figure--still large and powerful, though
evidently in its decline--rather alarmed me. He had a pen in his
hand, and in the glimpse I caught of his room in passing, I saw that
it was covered with a litter of papers.

Leaving him standing there, we went up to the top room. I tapped at
the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, "We are locked in.
Mrs. Blinder's got the key!"

I applied the key on hearing this and opened the door. In a poor room
with a sloping ceiling and containing very little furniture was a
mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a
heavy child of eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather
was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets
as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that
their noses looked red and pinched and their small figures shrunken
as the boy walked up and down nursing and hushing the child with its
head on his shoulder.

"Who has locked you up here alone?" we naturally asked.

"Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at us.

"Is Charley your brother?"

"No. She's my sister, Charlotte. Father called her Charley."

"Are there any more of you besides Charley?"

"Me," said the boy, "and Emma," patting the limp bonnet of the child
he was nursing. "And Charley."

"Where is Charley now?"

"Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to walk up and down again
and taking the nankeen bonnet much too near the bedstead by trying to
gaze at us at the same time.

We were looking at one another and at these two children when there
came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd
and older-looking in the face--pretty-faced too--wearing a womanly
sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare arms on a
womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with
washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she wiped off her
arms. But for this, she might have been a child playing at washing
and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick observation of the
truth.

She had come running from some place in the neighbourhood and had
made all the haste she could. Consequently, though she was very
light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she
stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us.

"Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy.

The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to be
taken by Charley. The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of
manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at us
over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.

"Is it possible," whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the
little creature and got her to sit down with her load, the boy
keeping close to her, holding to her apron, "that this child works
for the rest? Look at this! For God's sake, look at this!"

It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two
of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet
with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the
childish figure.

"Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"

"Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.

"Oh! What a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age,
Charley!"

I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half
playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.

"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my
guardian.

"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
confidence, "since father died."

"And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian,
turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"

"Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing
to-day."

"God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to
reach the tub!"

"In pattens I am, sir," she said quickly. "I've got a high pair as
belonged to mother."

"And when did mother die? Poor mother!"

"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at
the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a
mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home and
did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I began
to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"

"And do you often go out?"

"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling,
"because of earning sixpences and shillings!"

"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"

"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder
comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and
perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom
an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"

"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.

"When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they,
Tom?"

"Yes, Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright."

"Then he's as good as gold," said the little creature--Oh, in such a
motherly, womanly way! "And when Emma's tired, he puts her to bed.
And when he's tired he goes to bed himself. And when I come home and
light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up again and has it
with me. Don't you, Tom?"

"Oh, yes, Charley!" said Tom. "That I do!" And either in this glimpse
of the great pleasure of his life or in gratitude and love for
Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the scanty
folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying.

It was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed among
these children. The little orphan girl had spoken of their father and
their mother as if all that sorrow were subdued by the necessity of
taking courage, and by her childish importance in being able to work,
and by her bustling busy way. But now, when Tom cried, although she
sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at us, and did not by any
movement disturb a hair of the head of either of her little charges,
I saw two silent tears fall down her face.

I stood at the window with Ada, pretending to look at the housetops,
and the blackened stack of chimneys, and the poor plants, and the
birds in little cages belonging to the neighbours, when I found that
Mrs. Blinder, from the shop below, had come in (perhaps it had taken
her all this time to get upstairs) and was talking to my guardian.

"It's not much to forgive 'em the rent, sir," she said; "who could
take it from them!"

"Well, well!" said my guardian to us two. "It is enough that the time
will come when this good woman will find that it WAS much, and that
forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these--This child," he
added after a few moments, "could she possibly continue this?"

"Really, sir, I think she might," said Mrs. Blinder, getting her
heavy breath by painful degrees. "She's as handy as it's possible to
be. Bless you, sir, the way she tended them two children after the
mother died was the talk of the yard! And it was a wonder to see her
with him after he was took ill, it really was! 'Mrs. Blinder,' he
said to me the very last he spoke--he was lying there--'Mrs.
Blinder, whatever my calling may have been, I see a angel sitting in
this room last night along with my child, and I trust her to Our
Father!'"

"He had no other calling?" said my guardian.

"No, sir," returned Mrs. Blinder, "he was nothing but a follerers.
When he first came to lodge here, I didn't know what he was, and I
confess that when I found out I gave him notice. It wasn't liked in
the yard. It wasn't approved by the other lodgers. It is NOT a
genteel calling," said Mrs. Blinder, "and most people do object to
it. Mr. Gridley objected to it very strong, and he is a good lodger,
though his temper has been hard tried."

"So you gave him notice?" said my guardian.

"So I gave him notice," said Mrs. Blinder. "But really when the time
came, and I knew no other ill of him, I was in doubts. He was
punctual and diligent; he did what he had to do, sir," said Mrs.
Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr. Skimpole with her eye, "and it's
something in this world even to do that."

"So you kept him after all?"

"Why, I said that if he could arrange with Mr. Gridley, I could
arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its
being liked or disliked in the yard. Mr. Gridley gave his consent
gruff--but gave it. He was always gruff with him, but he has been
kind to the children since. A person is never known till a person is
proved."

"Have many people been kind to the children?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"Upon the whole, not so bad, sir," said Mrs. Blinder; "but certainly
not so many as would have been if their father's calling had been
different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers made up a
little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had always joked and
tapped their shoulders when he went by came forward with a little
subscription, and--in general--not so bad. Similarly with Charlotte.
Some people won't employ her because she was a follerer's child; some
people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having
her to work for them, with that and all her draw-backs upon her, and
perhaps pay her less and put upon her more. But she's patienter than
others would be, and is clever too, and always willing, up to the
full mark of her strength and over. So I should say, in general, not
so bad, sir, but might be better."

Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity
of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before it
was fully restored. Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us when his
attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the room of the
Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen on our way
up.

"I don't know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentlemen," he
said, as if he resented our presence, "but you'll excuse my coming
in. I don't come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well, Tom!
Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?"

He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded as
a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern
character and his manner to us was as rude as it could be. My
guardian noticed it and respected it.

"No one, surely, would come here to stare about him," he said mildly.

"May be so, sir, may be so," returned the other, taking Tom upon his
knee and waving him off impatiently. "I don't want to argue with
ladies and gentlemen. I have had enough of arguing to last one man
his life."

"You have sufficient reason, I dare say," said Mr. Jarndyce, "for
being chafed and irritated--"

"There again!" exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. "I am of
a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!"

"Not very, I think."

"Sir," said Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as if
he meant to strike him, "do you know anything of Courts of Equity?"

"Perhaps I do, to my sorrow."

"To your sorrow?" said the man, pausing in his wrath, "if so, I beg
your pardon. I am not polite, I know. I beg your pardon! Sir," with
renewed violence, "I have been dragged for five and twenty years over
burning iron, and I have lost the habit of treading upon velvet. Go
into the Court of Chancery yonder and ask what is one of the standing
jokes that brighten up their business sometimes, and they will tell
you that the best joke they have is the man from Shropshire. I," he
said, beating one hand on the other passionately, "am the man from
Shropshire."

"I believe I and my family have also had the honour of furnishing
some entertainment in the same grave place," said my guardian
composedly. "You may have heard my name--Jarndyce."

"Mr. Jarndyce," said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, "you
bear your wrongs more quietly than I can bear mine. More than that, I
tell you--and I tell this gentleman, and these young ladies, if they
are friends of yours--that if I took my wrongs in any other way, I
should be driven mad! It is only by resenting them, and by revenging
them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get,
that I am able to keep my wits together. It is only that!" he said,
speaking in a homely, rustic way and with great vehemence. "You may
tell me that I over-excite myself. I answer that it's in my nature to
do it, under wrong, and I must do it. There's nothing between doing
it, and sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad woman
that haunts the court. If I was once to sit down under it, I should
become imbecile."

The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his
face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied what
he said, were most painful to see.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he said, "consider my case. As true as there is a
heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father
(a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so forth to my
mother for her life. After my mother's death, all was to come to me
except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was then to pay my
brother. My mother died. My brother some time afterwards claimed his
legacy. I and some of my relations said that he had had a part of it
already in board and lodging and some other things. Now mind! That
was the question, and nothing else. No one disputed the will; no one
disputed anything but whether part of that three hundred pounds had
been already paid or not. To settle that question, my brother filing
a bill, I was obliged to go into this accursed Chancery; I was forced
there because the law forced me and would let me go nowhere else.
Seventeen people were made defendants to that simple suit! It first
came on after two years. It was then stopped for another two years
while the master (may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my
father's son, about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal
creature. He then found out that there were not defendants
enough--remember, there were only seventeen as yet!--but that we must
have another who had been left out and must begin all over again. The
costs at that time--before the thing was begun!--were three times the
legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to
escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my
father's, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen
into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else--and here I
stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are thousands
and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds. Is mine
less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole living was
in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?"

Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and
that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this
monstrous system.

"There again!" said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage. "The
system! I am told on all hands, it's the system. I mustn't look to
individuals. It's the system. I mustn't go into court and say, 'My
Lord, I beg to know this from you--is this right or wrong? Have you
the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am
dismissed?' My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer
the system. I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by
being so cool and satisfied--as they all do, for I know they gain by
it while I lose, don't I?--I mustn't say to him, 'I will have
something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!' HE is
not responsible. It's the system. But, if I do no violence to any of
them, here--I may! I don't know what may happen if I am carried
beyond myself at last! I will accuse the individual workers of that
system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!"

His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage
without seeing it.

"I have done!" he said, sitting down and wiping his face. "Mr.
Jarndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it. I
have been in prison for contempt of court. I have been in prison for
threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that
trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I
sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it amusing,
too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and
all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained
myself. I tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become
imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in
my part of the country say they remember me so, but now I must have
this vent under my sense of injury or nothing could hold my wits
together. It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley,' the Lord
Chancellor told me last week, 'not to waste your time here, and to
stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.' 'My Lord, my Lord, I
know it would,' said I to him, 'and it would have been far better for
me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily
for me, I can't undo the past, and the past drives me here!'
Besides," he added, breaking fiercely out, "I'll shame them. To the
last, I'll show myself in that court to its shame. If I knew when I
was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to
speak with, I would die there, saying, 'You have brought me here and
sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet
foremost!'"

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its
contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was
quiet.

"I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour," he said,
going to them again, "and let them play about. I didn't mean to say
all this, but it don't much signify. You're not afraid of me, Tom,
are you?"

"No!" said Tom. "You ain't angry with ME."

"You are right, my child. You're going back, Charley? Aye? Come then,
little one!" He took the youngest child on his arm, where she was
willing enough to be carried. "I shouldn't wonder if we found a
ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let's go and look for him!"

He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a
certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went
downstairs to his room.

Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our
arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really very
pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes.
Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising
energy--intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious
blacksmith--and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years
ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous
combativeness upon--a sort of Young Love among the thorns--when the
Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated him with the exact
thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise
he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or
he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of
parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of Chancery
had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was
much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided
for. Then look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father
of these charming children) illustrated the same principle! He, Mr.
Skimpole, himself, had sometimes repined at the existence of
Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He could had dispensed
with Coavinses. There had been times when, if he had been a sultan,
and his grand vizier had said one morning, "What does the Commander
of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?" he might have
even gone so far as to reply, "The head of Coavinses!" But what
turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving
employment to a most deserving man, that he had been a benefactor to
Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up
these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these
social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled and the
tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room and
thought, "I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little
comforts were MY work!"

There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these
fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of
the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even
as he turned towards us from a little private talk with Mrs. Blinder.
We kissed Charley, and took her downstairs with us, and stopped
outside the house to see her run away to her work. I don't know where
she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature in
her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way at the bottom of
the court and melt into the city's strife and sound like a dewdrop in
an ocean.

My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished
fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her. To-day she
is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow
she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence can with
confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has some trouble
to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful
ally, for better and for worse--the gout--darts into the old oak
bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs.

Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a
demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male
line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory of
man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved,
sir. Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have
taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but
the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the
levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has
come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the
pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities.
Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he
has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the
discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the
aristocracy, "My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to
you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout."

Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family disorder
as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels
that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and spasmodically
twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken somewhere,
but he thinks, "We have all yielded to this; it belongs to us; it has
for some hundreds of years been understood that we are not to make
the vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble terms; and I
submit myself to the compromise."

And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in
the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of
my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long
perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with
soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in
the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a
chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode
a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside,
his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each of us was
a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of himself and
melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices of the rooks
now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony to his greatness
too. And he is very great this day. And woe to Boythorn or other
daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an inch with him!

My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her
portrait. She has flitted away to town, with no intention of
remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion of
the fashionable intelligence. The house in town is not prepared for
her reception. It is muffled and dreary. Only one Mercury in powder
gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last night to
another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to good society,
that if that sort of thing was to last--which it couldn't, for a man
of his spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of his figure couldn't be
expected to bear it--there would be no resource for him, upon his
honour, but to cut his throat!

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the
house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the
outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him
when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been
between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who
from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very
curiously brought together!

Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a question
by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to
keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that much; he found it out.

Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a ruinous place
known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a
black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the
crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by
some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took
to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements
contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch
vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd
of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards;
and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips
in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more
evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle,
and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to
Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly
to do it.

Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the
springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has
fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and
have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain,
and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several
more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone's
may be expected to be a good one.

This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an
insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so.
Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original plaintiff
or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here when
the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers
came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive
name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the
pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly Jo don't know.

"For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink."

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the
streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the
meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and
at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To
see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen
deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that
language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must
be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on
Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps
Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means
anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be
hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would
appear to be perfectly true that I have no business here, or there,
or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I AM
here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the
creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told
that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a
witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the
horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I
belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose
delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a
bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only
knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and
immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest
thing of all.

Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning which is
always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the door-step of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives
it a brush when he has finished as an acknowledgment of the
accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice and wonders what
it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs to look
up the precious souls among the coco-nuts and bread-fruit.

He goes to his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day. The
town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and
whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower
animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is
market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided,
run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and
foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often
sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a
drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and
evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for
some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three
or four, can't remember where he left them, looks up and down the
street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his
ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog,
accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep,
ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls
of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been
taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen
to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal
satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or
regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses,
they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human
listener is the brute!

Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not
their bite.

The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and drizzly.
Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the
horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for
the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone's. Twilight comes on; gas
begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder,
runs along the margin of the pavement. A wretched evening is
beginning to close in.

In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to the
nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a
disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming. We
are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow
shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened
Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points
with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively
toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason,
look out of window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he does
not look out of window.

And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are
women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks--too many; they are
at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the matter of
that, they create business for lawyers. What would it be to see a
woman going by, even though she were going secretly? They are all
secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well.

But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his house
behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner there is
something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an upper servant by
her attire, yet in her air and step, though both are hurried and
assumed--as far as she can assume in the muddy streets, which she
treads with an unaccustomed foot--she is a lady. Her face is veiled,
and still she sufficiently betrays herself to make more than one of
those who pass her look round sharply.

She never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in her
and can follow it. She never turns her head until she comes to the
crossing where Jo plies with his broom. He crosses with her and begs.
Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed on the other
side. Then she slightly beckons to him and says, "Come here!"

Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court.

"Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?" she asked behind her
veil.

"I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about
no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."

"Were you examined at an inquest?"

"I don't know nothink about no--where I was took by the beadle, do
you mean?" says Jo. "Was the boy's name at the inkwhich Jo?"

"Yes."

"That's me!" says Jo.

"Come farther up."

"You mean about the man?" says Jo, following. "Him as wos dead?"

"Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living, so
very ill and poor?"

"Oh, jist!" says Jo.

"Did he look like--not like YOU?" says the woman with abhorrence.

"Oh, not so bad as me," says Jo. "I'm a reg'lar one I am! You didn't
know him, did you?"

"How dare you ask me if I knew him?"

"No offence, my lady," says Jo with much humility, for even he has
got at the suspicion of her being a lady.

"I am not a lady. I am a servant."

"You are a jolly servant!" says Jo without the least idea of saying
anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration.

"Listen and be silent. Don't talk to me, and stand farther from me!
Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the account I
read? The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the place where
you were taken to, and the place where he was buried? Do you know the
place where he was buried?"

Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was
mentioned.

"Go before me and show me all those dreadful places. Stop opposite to
each, and don't speak to me unless I speak to you. Don't look back.
Do what I want, and I will pay you well."

Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off
on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider
their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods his ragged head.

"I'm fly," says Jo. "But fen larks, you know. Stow hooking it!"

"What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims the servant,
recoiling from him.

"Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo.

"I don't understand you. Go on before! I will give you more money
than you ever had in your life."

Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub,
takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly with
his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and mire.

Cook's Court. Jo stops. A pause.

"Who lives here?"

"Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull," says Jo in a
whisper without looking over his shoulder.

"Go on to the next."

Krook's house. Jo stops again. A longer pause.

"Who lives here?"

"HE lived here," Jo answers as before.

After a silence he is asked, "In which room?"

"In the back room up there. You can see the winder from this corner.
Up there! That's where I see him stritched out. This is the
public-ouse where I was took to."

"Go on to the next!"

It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first
suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look
round. By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, they
come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp (lighted
now), and to the iron gate.

"He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.

"Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!"

"There!" says Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Among them piles of bones,
and close to that there kitchin winder! They put him wery nigh the
top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver
it for you with my broom if the gate was open. That's why they locks
it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's always locked. Look at the
rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the
ground!"

The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous
archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting
out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away from her,
for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands
staring and is still staring when she recovers herself.

"Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?"

"I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still
staring.

"Is it blessed?"

"Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed.

"Is it blessed?"

"I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but I
shouldn't think it warn't. Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled in
his mind. "It an't done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think
it was t'othered myself. But I don't know nothink!"

The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to take
of what she has said herself. She draws off her glove to get some
money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white and small her
hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such sparkling
rings.

She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and
shuddering as their hands approach. "Now," she adds, "show me the
spot again!"

Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and
with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At length,
looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible, he finds
that he is alone.

His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light
and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold. His next is
to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its quality.
His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep the
step and passage with great care. His job done, he sets off for
Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps to
produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as a
reassurance of its being genuine.

The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my Lady
goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls. Sir Leicester is
fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the gout;
he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a monotonous
pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper even by the
fireside in his own snug dressing-room.

"Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the
house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. "His dressing-room is
on my Lady's side. And in all these years I never heard the step upon
the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!"

Richard leaves to start his studies. He is hopeful about a career as a surgeon, but continues to hope to inherit a fortune through the Jarndyce suit. Esther and Jarndyce find this troubling. Esther and the others go to visit the Jellyby household, and see Caddy and Peepy. Peepy is in a disheveled state, as usual, but Caddy has endeavored to make her appearance somewhat better, and looks very pretty. She tells them good and bad news. She is engaged to young Mr. Prince Turveydrop, the son of the dancing master Mr. Turveydrop. The old man is a "model of deportment" but makes his son do all the work in the dancing school. Also, Mr. Jellyby is on the brink of bankruptcy. The party continues to Miss Flite, who is being attended professionally by Dr. Woodcourt. She has quite recovered, and talks merrily about her good fortune in being forwarded seven shillings a week from some mysterious source through Kenge and Carboy's. The source is not revealed, but Mr. Jarndyce, Esther notes, is staring intently at Miss Flite's birds during this interlude, and Esther draws her own conclusions. Caddy Jellyby and Miss Flite have become friends, and Caddy helps Miss Flite to use her newfound money to best advantage. Mr. Krook intrudes, and shares that he has been attempting to learn to read. Allan Woodcourt, who is also Mr. Krook's doctor, converses with the company, is invited to dinner, and becomes friends with Esther, Ada, and Richard. In Chapter 15, Mr. Skimpole reveals that Mr. Neckett of Coavinses has died, leaving three destitute children. The party goes to visit them, and meets Charley , Tom and Emma . The two younger children are locked in while Charley, whoses real name is Charlotte, goes out to work each day for some money. Charley is hardworking and tries hard to be a good mother to her younger siblings. The lodgers in the house help out with the children also, but their situation is desperate. Mr. Gridley reveals that he is also embroiled in a Chancery suit which has ruined his life. He should have inherited money but the Chancery delay has consumed it. He and Jarndyce agree on the evils of Chancery. In Chapter 16, Sir Leicester is afflicted with gout, and laying in sickbed at Chesney Wold. He considers it a privilege to have such an aristocratic disease, which all of his lineage have also had. He waits in the country looking at a picture of his lady. Lady Dedlock, meanwhile, goes to their house in London and secretly leaves it dressed in servant's dress, veiled. Mr. Tulkinghorn sees her in passing, but does not recognize her. He finds, however, the ladylike bearing to be incongrous with the plain clothing. Jo leaves Tom-all-Alone's, a street of vacant squatter's houses in a dingy street in London. He walks to his usual haunts near the court of Chancery. Lady Dedlock seeks out and finds Jo the crossing-sweeper. Though he is abhorrent to her, she has him guide her to Krook's house where Nemo lodged. She is shown the tavern where the inquest took place, and then the charnel-house of bones behind an iron grate where Nemo's body was lain. She is horrified, gives Jo a gold coin, and disappears.

Again, Dickens treats the dissarray of badly parented households.  The Jellybys house is in an even more chaotic state than it was previously, and Caddy has taken a route out, by spending time with Miss Flite and becoming engaged to Prince Turveydrop.  Another variation on the bad parent is presented in old Mr. Turveydrop, who is a vapid and pretentious man who cares only for appearances.  His dead wife, and now his only overworked son, taken in by his accomplishments in "deportment," support him entirely; and now Prince spends all his time running the dancing school so his father can be seen around town in the fashionable places.  No doubt Prince and Caddy bond over their difficult situations and unkind parents. Miss Flite is yet another recipient of Mr. Jarndyce's quiet charity, though she fully believes it to come from the Lord Chancellor.  Her strangely named birds are a direct jab at the legal system  and she remains a symbol, if a pleasant one, of the wastes and foolishness of Chancery.  Mr. Gridley is introduced, as the aging but angry male counterpart of Miss Flite.  His kindness to the Neckett children instantly makes him a sympathetic figure. The seemingly unimportant detail of Mr. Krook learning how to read will be important to the story later.  The scene at Miss Flite's creates another, separate meeting for Esther and Woodcourt, and brings Woodcourt closer into Esther and Jarndyce's circle. Lady Dedlock's fantastic incognito trip to the scenes of Nemo's life and death give us some more insight into her character. She is repulsed by Jo, rather than feeling kindness and charity to him , but continues on to see the place of Nemo's demise.  We wonder what motivates her so strongly. The Neckett children and Gridley are further examples of victims of the current system of society.  Charley Neckett has had to become a woman much before her time, and even young Tom has had to learn to care for his baby sister.  We are told by Mrs. Blinder than sometimes Charley can't find work, because her father was a "follerer" , and so the three children struggle to survive as orphans on their own.  Mrs. Blinder and Mr. Gridley are kind to them , but they are not substitutes for good parents. At the close of this section there is an eerie foreshadowing back at Chesney Wold -- Mrs. Rouncewell hears the step on the Ghost's Walk very loudly, implying that the fall of the pride of the house of Dedlock could be near.