“You may bring the letters,” she repeats
in the same tone, “if you —please.”
“It shall be done. I wish your ladyship
good day.”
On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket,
barred and clasped like an old strong-chest.
She, looking at him still, takes it to her and unlocks
it.
“Oh! I assure your ladyship I am not actuated
by any motives of that sort,” says Mr. Guppy,
“and I couldn’t accept anything of the
kind. I wish your ladyship good day, and am much
obliged to you all the same.”
So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs,
where the supercilious Mercury does not consider himself
called upon to leave his Olympus by the hall-fire
to let the young man out.
As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over
his newspaper, is there no influence in the house
to startle him, not to say to make the very trees
at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very
portraits frown, the very armour stir?
No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and
air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house
in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued
indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint
vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this
cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure
on its knees.
“O my child, my child! Not dead in the
first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me,
but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced
me and my name! O my child, O my child!”
Esther’s Narrative
Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor
came to pass a few days with us. It was an elderly
lady. It was Mrs. Woodcourt, who, having come
from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and having
written to my guardian, “by her son Allan’s
desire,” to report that she had heard from him
and that he was well “and sent his kind remembrances
to all of us,” had been invited by my guardian
to make a visit to Bleak House. She stayed with
us nearly three weeks. She took very kindly
to me and was extremely confidential, so much so that
sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable.
I had no right, I knew very well, to be uncomfortable
because she confided in me, and I felt it was unreasonable;
still, with all I could do, I could not quite help
it.
She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with
her hands folded in each other looking so very watchful
while she talked to me that perhaps I found that rather
irksome. Or perhaps it was her being so upright
and trim, though I don’t think it was that,
because I thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor
can it have been the general expression of her face,
which was very sparkling and pretty for an old lady.
I don’t know what it was. Or at least
if I do now, I thought I did not then. Or at
least—but it don’t matter.
