Bleak House

Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, though the evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn’s windows are wide open, and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be desirable characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or January with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry long vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks like peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look tolerably cool to-night.

Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn’s windows, and plenty more has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings as much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law—or Mr. Tulkinghorn, one of its trustiest representatives—may scatter, on occasion, in the eyes of the laity.

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will—all a mystery to every one—and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly and uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild, shining man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer bids him fill his glass.

“Now, Snagsby,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, “to go over this odd story again.”

“If you please, sir.”

“You told me when you were so good as to step round here last night—”

“For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; but I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that person, and I thought it possible that you might—just—wish—to—”

Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr. Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, “I must ask you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure.”

“Not at all,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “You told me, Snagsby, that you put on your hat and came round without mentioning your intention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it’s not a matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned.”

“Well, sir,” returns Mr. Snagsby, “you see, my little woman is—not to put too fine a point upon it—inquisitive. She’s inquisitive. Poor little thing, she’s liable to spasms, and it’s good for her to have her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it—I should say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether it concerns her or not—especially not. My little woman has a very active mind, sir.”

Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his hand, “Dear me, very fine wine indeed!”

“Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “And to-night too?”

“Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in—not to put too fine a point on it—in a pious state, or in what she considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the name they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He has a great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am not quite favourable to his style myself. That’s neither here nor there. My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier for me to step round in a quiet manner.”

Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. “Fill your glass, Snagsby.”

“Thank you, sir, I am sure,” returns the stationer with his cough of deference. “This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!”

“It is a rare wine now,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “It is fifty years old.”

“Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It might be—any age almost.” After rendering this general tribute to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his hand for drinking anything so precious.

“Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?” asks Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.

“With pleasure, sir.”

Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer repeats Jo’s statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks off with, “Dear me, sir, I wasn’t aware there was any other gentleman present!”

Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about him at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing.

“Don’t mind this gentleman,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way. “This is only Mr. Bucket.”

“Oh, indeed, sir?” returns the stationer, expressing by a cough that he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be.

“I wanted him to hear this story,” says the lawyer, “because I have half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?”

“It’s very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on, and he’s not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don’t object to go down with me to Tom-all-Alone’s and point him out, we can have him here in less than a couple of hours’ time. I can do it without Mr. Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way.”

“Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby,” says the lawyer in explanation.

“Is he indeed, sir?” says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his clump of hair to stand on end.

“And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the place in question,” pursues the lawyer, “I shall feel obliged to you if you will do so.”

In a moment’s hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips down to the bottom of his mind.

“Don’t you be afraid of hurting the boy,” he says. “You won’t do that. It’s all right as far as the boy’s concerned. We shall only bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him, and he’ll be paid for his trouble and sent away again. It’ll be a good job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy sent away all right. Don’t you be afraid of hurting him; you an’t going to do that.”

“Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!” cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And reassured, “Since that’s the case—”

“Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby,” resumes Bucket, taking him aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a confidential tone. “You’re a man of the world, you know, and a man of business, and a man of sense. That’s what YOU are.”

“I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion,” returns the stationer with his cough of modesty, “but—”

“That’s what YOU are, you know,” says Bucket. “Now, it an’t necessary to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which is a business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and have his senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in your business once)—it an’t necessary to say to a man like you that it’s the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet. Don’t you see? Quiet!”

“Certainly, certainly,” returns the other.

“I don’t mind telling YOU,” says Bucket with an engaging appearance of frankness, “that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be a doubt whether this dead person wasn’t entitled to a little property, and whether this female hasn’t been up to some games respecting that property, don’t you see?”

“Oh!” says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.

“Now, what YOU want,” pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, “is that every person should have their rights according to justice. That’s what YOU want.”

“To be sure,” returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.

“On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a—do you call it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle used to call it.”

“Why, I generally say customer myself,” replies Mr. Snagsby.

“You’re right!” returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite affectionately. “—On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in confidence, to Tom-all-Alone’s and to keep the whole thing quiet ever afterwards and never mention it to any one. That’s about your intentions, if I understand you?”

“You are right, sir. You are right,” says Mr. Snagsby.