Bleak House. Charles Dickens
out. She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner, and insolent grace. They meet again at dinner – again, next day – again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences: so oddly out of place, and yet so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another, as any two people, enclosed within the same walls, could. But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows – all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.
Chapter XIII
Esther's narrative
We held many consultations about what Richard was to be; first, without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him; but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and it wasn't a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide within himself, whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary boyish inclination, or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well, he really had tried very often, and he couldn't make out.
'How much of this indecision of character,' Mr. Jarndyce said to me, 'is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don't pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or confirmed in him a habit of putting off – and trusting to this, that, and the other chance, without knowing what chance – and dismissing everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences, and escape them.'
I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's education had not counteracted those influences, or directed his character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had learnt, I understood, to make Latin Verses of several sorts, in the most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the Verses, and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again, unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.
To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject, and do not even now know whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to the same extent – or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever did.
'I haven't the least idea,' said Richard, musing, 'what I had better be. Except that I am quite sure I don't want to go into the Church, it's a toss-up.'
'You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge's way?' suggested Mr. Jarndyce.
'I don't know that, sir!' replied Richard. 'I am fond of boating. Articled clerks go a good deal on the water. It's a capital profession!'
'Surgeon—' suggested Mr. Jarndyce.
'That's the thing, sir!' cried Richard.
I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.
'That's the thing, sir!' repeated Richard, with the greatest enthusiasm. 'We have got it at last. M.R.G.S.!'
He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it heartily. He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing was the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion, because, having never had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken by the newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin Verses often ended in this, or whether Richard's was a solitary case.
Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him, seriously, and to put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews; but invariably told Ada and me 'that it was all right,' and then began to talk about something else.
'By Heaven!' cried Mr. Boy thorn, who interested himself strongly in the subject – though I need not say that, for he could do nothing weakly; 'I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is in it, the better for mankind, and the worse for those mercenary task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base and despicable,' cried Mr. Boythorn, 'the treatment of Surgeons aboard ship is such, that I would submit the legs – both legs – of every member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture, and render it a transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them, if the system were not wholly changed in eight-and-forty hours!'
'Wouldn't you give them a week?' asked Mr. Jarndyce.
'No!' cried Mr. Boythorn, firmly. 'Not on any consideration! Eight-and-forty hours! As to Corporations, Parishes, Vestry-Boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods, who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by Heaven! they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the Sun – as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge, to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their expensive education, with pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I would have the necks of every one of them wrung, and their skulls arranged in Surgeons' Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession – in order that its younger members might understand from actual measurement, in early life, how thick skulls may become!'
He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with a most agreeable smile, and suddenly thundering, Ha, ha, ha! over and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be quite subdued by the exertion.
As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice, after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr. Jarndyce, and had expired; and he still continued to assure Ada and me, in the same final manner, that it was 'all right;' it became advisable to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his eyeglasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a little girl.
'Ah!' said Mr. Kenge. 'Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr. Jarndyce; a very good profession.'
'The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently pursued,' observed my Guardian, with a glance at Richard.
'O, no doubt,' said Mr. Kenge. 'Diligently.'
'But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits, that are worth much,' said Mr. Jarndyce, 'it is not a special consideration which another choice would be likely to escape.'
'Truly,' said Mr. Kenge. 'And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so meritoriously acquitted himself in the – shall I say the classic shades? – in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born, not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which he enters.'
'You may rely upon it,' said Richard, in his off-hand manner, 'that I shall go at it