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.C.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. Boythorn, 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 eye-glasses 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.
"Oh, 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 and do my best."
"Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!" said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head. "Really,
when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at it and to do his
best," nodding feelingly and smoothly over those expressions, "I would submit to
you that we have only to inquire into the best mode of carrying out the object
of his ambition. Now, with reference to placing Mr. Richard with some
sufficiently eminent practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?"
"No one, Rick, I think?" said my guardian.
"No one, sir," said Richard.
"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge. "As to situation, now. Is there any
particular feeling on that head?"
"N--no," said Richard.
"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge again.
"I should like a little variety," said Richard; "I mean a good range of
experience."
"Very requisite, no doubt," returned Mr. Kenge. "I think this may be easily
arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place, to discover a
sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we make our want--and shall I
add, our ability to pay a premium?-- known, our only difficulty will be in the
selection of one from a large number. We have only, in the second place, to
observe those little formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of
life and our being under the guardianship of the court. We shall soon be--shall
I say, in Mr. Richard's own light-hearted manner, 'going at it'--to our heart's
content. It is a coincidence," said Mr. Kenge with a tinge of melancholy in his
smile, "one of those coincidences which may or may not require an explanation
beyond our present limited faculties, that I have a cousin in the medical
profession. He might be deemed eligible by you and might be disposed to respond
to this proposal. I can answer for him as little as for you, but he MIGHT!"
As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr. Kenge should
see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before proposed to take us to London for
a few weeks, it was settled next day that we should make our visit at once and
combine Richard's business with it.
Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a cheerful
lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop. London was a great wonder
to us, and we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which
appeared to be less capable of exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the
principal theatres, too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were
worth seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I began to be
made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy.
I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard was in the
place he liked best, behind Ada's chair, when, happening to look down into the
pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened down upon his head and woe
depicted in his face, looking up at me. I felt all through the performance that
he never looked at the actors but constantly looked at me, and always with a
carefully prepared expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest
dejection.
It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very
embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we never went to
the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit, always with his hair straight
and flat, his shirt-collar turned down, and a general feebleness about him. If
he were not there when we went in, and I began to hope he would not come and
yielded myself for a little while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to
encounter his languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from that time, to
be quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the evening.
I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If he would only have
brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been bad enough; but
to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at me, and always in that
demonstrative state of despondency, put such a constraint upon me that I did not
like to laugh at the play, or to cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed
able to do nothing naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of
the box, I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada relied on
having me next them and that they could never have talked together so happily if
anybody else had been in my place. So there I sat, not knowing where to
look--for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. Guppy's eyes were following me--and
thinking of the dreadful expense to which this young man was putting himself on
my account.
Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce. Then I feared that the young man
would lose his situation and that I might ruin him. Sometimes I thought of
confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the possibility of his fighting Mr.
Guppy and giving him black eyes. Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or
shake my head. Then I felt I could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I
should write to his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to open a
correspondence would he to make the matter worse. I always came to the
conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing. Mr. Guppy's perseverance, all this
time, not only produced him regularly at any theatre to which we went, but
caused him to appear in the crowd as we were coming out, and even to get up
behind our fly-- where I am sure I saw him, two or three times, struggling among
the most dreadful spikes. After we got home, he haunted a post opposite our
house. The upholsterer's where we lodged being at the corner of two streets, and
my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was afraid to go near the window
when I went upstairs, lest I should see him (as I did one moonlight night)
leaning against the post and evidenfly catching cold. If Mr. Guppy had not been,
fortunately for me, engaged in the daytime, I really should have had no rest
from him.
While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so
extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring us to town
was not neglected. Mr. Kenge's cousin was a Mr. Bayham Badger, who had a good
practice at Chelsea and attended a large public institution besides. He was
quite willing to receive Richard into his house and to superintend his studies,
and as it seemed that those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger's
roof, and Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger
"well enough," an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor's consent was
obtained, and it was all settled.
On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr. Badger, we
were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger's house. We were to be "merely a
family party," Mrs. Badger's note said; and we found no lady there but Mrs.
Badger herself. She was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects,
indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the
guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little,
reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a
lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine
complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a
little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking gentleman
with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised eyes, some years
younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He admired her exceedingly, but
principally, and to begin with, on the curious ground (as it seemed to us) of
her having had three husbands. We had barely taken our seats when he said to Mr.
Jarndyce quite triumphantly, "You would hardly suppose that I am Mrs. Bayham
Badger's third!"
"Indeed?" said Mr. Jarndyce.
"Her third!" said Mr. Badger. "Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the appearance,
Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former husbands?"
I said "Not at all!"
"And most remarkable men!" said Mr. Badger in a tone of confidence. "Captain
Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger's first husband, was a very
distinguished officer indeed. The name of Professor Dingo, my immediate
predecessor, is one of European reputation."
Mrs. Badger overheard him and smiled.
"Yes, my dear!" Mr. Badger replied to the smile, "I was observing to Mr.
Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former husbands--both very
distinguished men. And they found it, as people generally do, difficult to
believe."
"I was barely twenty," said Mrs. Badger, "when I married Captain Swosser of
the Royal Navy. I was in the Mediterranean with him; I am quite a sailor. On the
twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I became the wife of Professor Dingo."
"Of European reputation," added Mr. Badger in an undertone.
"And when Mr. Badger and myself were married," pursued Mrs. Badger, "we were
married on the same day of the year. I had become attached to the day."
"So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands--two of them highly
distinguished men," said Mr. Badger, summing up the facts, "and each time upon
the twenty-first of March at eleven in the forenoon!"
We all expressed our admiration.
"But for Mr. Badger's modesty," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I would take leave to
correct him and say three distinguished men."
"Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce! What I always tell him!" observed Mrs. Badger.
"And, my dear," said Mr. Badger, "what do I always tell you? That without any
affectation of disparaging such professional distinction as I may have attained
(which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many opportunities of estimating), I am
not so weak--no, really," said Mr. Badger to us generally, "so unreasonable--as
to put my reputation on the same footing with such first-rate men as Captain
Swosser and Professor Dingo. Perhaps you may be interested, Mr. Jarndyce,"
continued Mr. Bayham Badger, leading the way into the next drawing-room, "in
this portrait of Captain Swosser. It was taken on his return home from the
African station, where he had suffered from the fever of the country. Mrs.
Badger considers it too yellow. But it's a very fine head. A very fine head!"
We all echoed, "A very fine head!"
"I feel when I look at it," said Mr. Badger, "'That's a man I should like to
have seen!' It strikingly bespeaks the first-class man that Captain Swosser
pre-eminently was. On the other side, Professor Dingo. I knew him well--attended
him in his last illness--a speaking likeness! Over the piano, Mrs. Bayham Badger
when Mrs. Swosser. Over the sofa, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Dingo. Of Mrs.
Bayham Badger IN ESSE, I possess the original and have no copy."
Dinner was now announced, and we went downstairs. It was a very genteel
entertainment, very handsomely served. But the captain and the professor still
ran in Mr. Badger's head, and as Ada and I had the honour of being under his
particular care, we had the full benefit of them.
"Water, Miss Summerson? Allow me! Not in that tumbler, pray. Bring me the
professor's goblet, James!"
Ada very much admired some artificial flowers under a glass.
"Astonishing how they keep!" said Mr. Badger. "They were presented to Mrs.
Bayham Badger when she was in the Mediterranean."
He invited Mr. Jarndyce to take a glass of claret.
"Not that claret!" he said. "Excuse me! This is an occasion, and ON an
occasion I produce some very special claret I happen to have. (James, Captain
Swosser's wine!) Mr. Jarndyce, this is a wine that was imported by the captain,
we will not say how many years ago. You will find it very curious. My dear, I
shall he happy to take some of this wine with you. (Captain Swosser's claret to
your mistress, James!) My love, your health!"
After dinner, when we ladies retired, we took Mrs. Badger's first and second
husband with us. Mrs. Badger gave us in the drawing-room a biographical sketch
of the life and services of Captain Swosser before his marriage and a more
minute account of him dating from the time when he fell in love with her at a
ball on board the Crippler, given to the officers of that ship when she lay in
Plymouth Harbour.
"The dear old Crippler!" said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head. "She was a noble
vessel. Trim, ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain Swosser used to say. You must
excuse me if I occasionally introduce a nautical expression; I was quite a
sailor once. Captain Swosser loved that craft for my sake. When she was no
longer in commission, he frequently said that if he were rich enough to buy her
old hulk, he would have an inscription let into the timbers of the quarter- deck
where we stood as partners in the dance to mark the spot where he fell--raked
fore and aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the fire from my tops. It was his
naval way of mentioning my eyes."
Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and looked in the glass.
"It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor Dingo," she resumed
with a plaintive smile. "I felt it a good deal at first. Such an entire
revolution in my mode of life! But custom, combined with science--particularly
science--inured me to it. Being the professor's sole companion in his botanical
excursions, I almost forgot that I had ever been afloat, and became quite
learned. It is singular that the professor was the antipodes of Captain Swosser
and that Mr. Badger is not in the least like either!"
We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and
Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints. In the
course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never madly loved but
once and that the object of that wild affection, never to be recalled in its
fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser. The professor was yet dying by inches in
the most dismal manner, and Mrs. Badger was giving us imitations of his way of
saying, with great difficulty, "Where is Laura? Let Laura give me my toast and
water!" when the entrance of the gentlemen consigned him to the tomb.
Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past, that Ada
and Richard were more than ever attached to each other's society, which was but
natural, seeing that they were going to be separated so soon. I was therefore
not very much surprised when we got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to
find Ada more silent than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her coming
into my arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden.
"My darling Esther!" murmured Ada. "I have a great secret to tell you!"
A mighty secret, my pretty one, no doubt!
"What is it, Ada?"
"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"
"Shall I try to guess?" said I.
"Oh, no! Don't! Pray don't!" cried Ada, very much startled by the idea of my
doing so.
"Now, I wonder who it can be about?" said I, pretending to consider.
"It's about--" said Ada in a whisper. "It's about--my cousin Richard!"
"Well, my own!" said I, kissing her bright hair, which was all I could see.
"And what about him?"
"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"
It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face, and
to know that she was not crying in sorrow but in a little glow of joy, and
pride, and hope, that I would not help her just yet.
"He says--I know it's very foolish, we are both so young--but he says," with
a burst of tears, "that he loves me dearly, Esther."
"Does he indeed?" said I. "I never heard of such a thing! Why, my pet of
pets, I could have told you that weeks and weeks ago!"
To see Ada lift up her flushed face in joyful surprise, and hold me round the
neck, and laugh, and cry, and blush, was so pleasant!
"Why, my darling," said I, "what a goose you must take me for! Your cousin
Richard has been loving you as plainly as he could for I don't know how long!"
"And yet you never said a word about it!" cried Ada, kissing me.
"No, my love," said I. "I waited to be told."
"But now I have told you, you don't think it wrong of me, do you?" returned
Ada. She might have coaxed me to say no if I had been the hardest-hearted duenna
in the world. Not being that yet, I said no very freely.
"And now," said I, "I know the worst of it."
"Oh, that's not quite the worst of it, Esther dear!" cried Ada, holding me
tighter and laying down her face again upon my breast.
"No?" said I. "Not even that?"
"No, not even that!" said Ada, shaking her head.
"Why, you never mean to say--" I was beginning in joke.
But Ada, looking up and smiling through her tear's, cried, "Yes, I do! You
know, you know I do!" And then sobbed out, "With all my heart I do! With all my
whole heart, Esther!"
I told her, laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I had known
the other! And we sat before the fire, and I had all the talking to myself for a
little while (though there was not much of it); and Ada was soon quiet and
happy.
"Do you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?" she asked.
"Unless my cousin John is blind, my pet," said I, "I should think my cousin
John knows pretty well as much as we know."
"We want to speak to him before Richard goes," said Ada timidly, "and we
wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so. Perhaps you wouldn't mind Richard's
coming in, Dame Durden?"
"Oh! Richard is outside, is he, my dear?" said I.
"I am not quite certain," returned Ada with a bashful simplicity that would
have won my heart if she had not won it long before, "but I think he's waiting
at the door."
There he was, of course. They brought a chair on either side of me, and put
me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in love with me instead of one
another, they were so confiding, and so trustful, and so fond of me. They went
on in their own wild way for a little while--I never stopped them; I enjoyed it
too much myself-- and then we gradually fell to considering how young they were,
and how there must be a lapse of several years before this early love could come
to anything, and how it could come to happiness only if it were real and lasting
and inspired them with a steady resolution to do their duty to each other, with
constancy, fortitude, and perseverance, each always for the other's sake. Well!
Richard said that he would work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada said
that she would work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they called me all
sorts of endearing and sensible names, and we sat there, advising and talking,
half the night. Finally, before we parted, I gave them my promise to speak to
their cousin John to- morrow.
So, when to-morrow came, I went to my guardian after breakfast, in the room
that was our town-substitute for the growlery, and told him that I had it in
trust to tell him something.
"Well, little woman," said he, shutting up his book, "if you have accepted
the trust, there can be no harm in it."
"I hope not, guardian," said I. "I can guarantee that there is no secrecy in
it. For it only happened yesterday."
"Aye? And what is it, Esther?"
"Guardian," said I, "you remember the happy night when first we came down to
Bleak House? When Ada was singing in the dark room?"
I wished to call to his remembrance the look he had given me then. Unless I
am much mistaken, I saw that I did so.
"Because--" said I with a little hesitation.
"Yes, my dear!" said he. "Don't hurry."
"Because," said I, "Ada and Richard have fallen in love. And have told each
other so."
"Already!" cried my guardian, quite astonished.
"Yes!" said I. "And to tell you the truth, guardian, I rather expected it."
"The deuce you did!" said he.
He sat considering for a minute or two, with his smile, at once so handsome
and so kind, upon his changing face, and then requested me to let them know that
he wished to see them. When they came, he encircled Ada with one arm in his
fatherly way and addressed himself to Richard with a cheerful gravity.
"Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am glad to have won your confidence. I hope to
preserve it. When I contemplated these relations between us four which have so
brightened my life and so invested it with new interests and pleasures, I
certainly did contemplate, afar off, the possibility of you and your pretty
cousin here (don't be shy, Ada, don't be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go
through life together. I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable. But
that was afar off, Rick, afar off!"
"We look afar off, sir," returned Richard.
"Well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "That's rational. Now, hear me, my dears! I might
tell you that you don't know your own minds yet, that a thousand things may
happen to divert you from one another, that it is well this chain of flowers you
have taken up is very easily broken, or it might become a chain of lead. But I
will not do that. Such wisdom will come soon enough, I dare say, if it is to
come at all. I will assume that a few years hence you will be in your hearts to
one another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking to you according to
that assumption is, if you DO change-- if you DO come to find that you are more
commonplace cousins to each other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl
(your manhood will excuse me, Rick!)--don't be ashamed still to confide in me,
for there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am only your friend and
distant kinsman. I have no power over you whatever. But I wish and hope to
retain your confidence if I do nothing to forfeit it."
"I am very sure, sir," returned Richard, "that I speak for Ada too when I say
that you have the strongest power over us both--rooted in respect, gratitude,
and affection--strengthening every day."
"Dear cousin John," said Ada, on his shoulder, "my father's place can never
be empty again. All the love and duty I could ever have rendered to him is
transferred to you."
"Come!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now for our assumption. Now we lift our eyes up
and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before you; and it is
most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in nothing but
in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen
waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is
nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of
all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely
meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real
success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be,
wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave
your cousin Ada here."
"I will leave IT here, sir," replied Richard smiling, "if I brought it here
just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to my cousin Ada in the
hopeful distance."
"Right!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "If you are not to make her happy, why should you
pursue her?"
"I wouldn't make her unhappy--no, not even for her love," retorted Richard
proudly.
"Well said!" cried Mr. Jarndyce. "That's well said! She remains here, in her
home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no less than in her home when
you revisit it, and all will go well. Otherwise, all will go ill. That's the end
of my preaching. I think you and Ada had better take a walk."
Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands with him, and
then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again directly, though, to
say that they would wait for me.
The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes as they passed
down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shining, and out at its farther
end. Richard with his head bent, and her hand drawn through his arm, was talking
to her very earnestly; and she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to
see nothing else. So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went
on lightly through the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then be
traversing the years to come and making them all years of brightness. So they
passed away into the shadow and were gone. It was only a burst of light that had
been so radiant. The room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded
over.
"Am I right, Esther?" said my guardian when they were gone.
He was so good and wise to ask ME whether he was right!
"Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants. Wants, at the core of so
much that is good!" said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head. "I have said nothing to
Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor always near." And he laid his
hand lovingly upon my head.
I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did all I could
to conceal it.
"Tut tut!" said he. "But we must take care, too, that our little woman's life
is not all consumed in care for others."
"Care? My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in the world!"
"I believe so, too," said he. "But some one may find out what Esther never
will--that the little woman is to be held in remembrance above all other
people!"
I have omitted to mention in its place that there was some one else at the
family dinner party. It was not a lady. It was a gentleman. It was a gentleman
of a dark complexion--a young surgeon. He was rather reserved, but I thought him
very sensible and agreeable. At least, Ada asked me if I did not, and I said
yes.
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