Bleak House. Charles Dickens
preparations were made for Mr. Boythorn's reception, and we looked forward to his arrival with some curiosity. The afternoon wore away, however, and he did not appear. The dinner-hour arrived, and still he did not appear. The dinner was put back an hour, and we were sitting round the fire with no light but the blaze, when the hall-door suddenly burst open, and the hall resounded with these words, uttered with the greatest vehemence and in a stentorian tone:
'We have been misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the turning to the right instead of to the left. He is the most intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth. His father must have been a most consummate villain, ever to have such a son. I would have had that fellow shot without the least remorse!'
'Did he do it on purpose?' Mr. Jarndyce inquired.
'I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his whole existence in misdirecting travellers!' returned the other. 'By my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld, when he was telling me to take the turning to the right. And yet I stood before that fellow face to face, and didn't knock his brains out!'
'Teeth, you mean?' said Mr. Jarndyce.
'Ha, ha, ha!' laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the whole house vibrate. 'What, you have not forgotten it yet! Ha, ha, ha! – And that was another most consummate vagabond! By my soul, the countenance of that fellow, when he was a boy, was the blackest image of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a scarecrow in a field of scoundrels. If I were to meet that most unparalleled despot in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like a rotten tree!'
'I have no doubt of it,' said Mr. Jarndyce. 'Now, will you come up-stairs?'
'By my soul, Jarndyce,' returned his guest, who seemed to refer to his watch, 'if you had been married, I would have turned back at the garden-gate, and gone away to the remotest summits of the Himalaya Mountains, sooner than I would have presented myself at this unseasonable hour.'
'Not quite so far, I hope?' said Mr. Jarndyce.
'By my life and honour, yes!' cried the visitor. 'I wouldn't be guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house waiting all this time, for any earthly consideration. I would infinitely rather destroy myself – infinitely rather!'
Talking thus, they went up-stairs; and presently we heard him in his bedroom thundering 'Ha, ha, ha!' and again 'Ha, ha, ha!' until the flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion, and to laugh as enjoyingly as he did, or as we did when we heard him laugh.
We all conceived a prepossession in his favour; for there was a sterling quality in this laugh, and in his vigorous healthy voice, and in the roundness and fulness with which he uttered every word he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance, when Mr. Jarndyce presented him. He was not only a very handsome old gentleman – upright and stalwart as he had been described to us – with a massive grey head, a fine composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it no rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a double chin but for the vehement emphasis in which it was constantly required to assist; but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile of so much sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, but showed himself exactly as he was – incapable (as Richard said) of anything on a limited scale, and firing away with those blank great guns, because he carried no small arms whatever – that really I could not help looking at him with equal pleasure as he sat at dinner, whether he smilingly conversed with Ada and me, or was led by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley of superlatives, or threw up his head like a bloodhound, and gave out that tremendous, Ha, ha, ha!
'You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?' said Mr. Jarndyce.
'By Heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!' replied the other. 'He is the most wonderful creature! I wouldn't take ten thousand guineas for that bird. I have left an annuity for his sole support, in case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and attachment, a phenomenon. And his father before him was one of the most astonishing birds that ever lived!'
The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so tame that he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn's man, on his forefinger, and, after taking a gentle flight round the room, alighted on his master's head. To hear Mr. Boythorn presently expressing the most implacable and passionate sentiments, with this fragile mite of a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to have a good illustration of his character, I thought.
'By my soul, Jarndyce,' he said, very gently holding up a bit of bread to the canary to peck at, 'if I were in your place, I would seize every Master in Chancery by the throat tomorrow morning, and shake him until his money rolled out of his pockets, and his bones rattled in his skin. I would have a settlement out of somebody, by fair means or by foul. If you would empower me to do it, I would do it for you with the greatest satisfaction!' (All this time the very small canary was eating out of his hand.)
'I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at such a point at present,' returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, 'that it would be greatly advanced, even by the legal process of shaking the Bench and the whole Bar.'
'There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery, on the face of the earth!' said Mr. Boythorn. 'Nothing but a mine below it on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and precedents collected in it, and every functionary belonging to it also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to atoms with ten thousand hundred-weight of gunpowder, would reform it in the least!'
It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with which he recommended this strong measure of reform. When we laughed, he threw up his head, and shook his broad chest, and again the whole country seemed to echo to his Ha, ha, ha! It had not the least effect in disturbing the bird, whose sense of security was complete; and who hopped about the table with its quick head now on this side and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master, as if he were no more than another bird.
'But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right of way?' said Mr. Jarndyce. 'You are not free from the toils of the law yourself!'
'The fellow has brought actions against me for trespass, and I have brought actions against him for trespass,' returned Mr. Boythorn. 'By Heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing. It is morally impossible that his name can be Sir Leicester. It must be Sir Lucifer.'
'Complimentary to our distant relation!' said my Guardian laughingly, to Ada and Richard.
'I would beg Miss Glare's pardon and Mr. Carstone's pardon,' resumed our visitor, 'if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair face of the lady, and the smile of the gentleman, that it is quite unnecessary, and that they keep their distant relation at a comfortable distance.'
'Or he keeps us,' suggested Richard.
'By my soul!' exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly firing another volley, 'that fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather was, the most stiff-necked, arrogant, imbecile, pig-headed numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of life but a walking-stick's! The whole of that family are the most solemnly conceited and consummate blockheads! – But it's no matter; he should not shut up my path if he were fifty baronets melted into one, and living in a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within another, like the ivory balls in a Chinese carving. The fellow, by his agent, or secretary, or somebody, writes to me, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, presents his compliments to Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, and has to call his attention to the fact that the green pathway by the old parsonage-house, now the property of Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir Leicester's right of way, being in fact a portion of the park of Chesney Wold; and that Sir Leicester finds it convenient to close up the same." I write to the fellow, "Mr. Lawrence Boythorn presents his compliments to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and has to call his attention to the fact that he totally denies the whole of Sir Leicester Dedlock's positions on every possible subject, and has to add, in reference to closing up the pathway, that he will be glad to see the man who may undertake to do it." The fellow sends a